Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  About Gravity is the Thing

  Abigail Sorensen has spent her life trying to unwrap the events of 1990.

  It was the year she started receiving random chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post.

  It was also the year Robert, her brother, disappeared on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

  She believes the absurdity of The Guidebook and the mystery of her brother’s disappearance must be connected.

  Now thirty-five, owner of The Happiness Café and mother of four-year-old Oscar, Abigail has been invited to learn the truth behind The Guidebook at an all-expenses-paid retreat.

  What she finds will be unexpected, life-affirming, and heartbreaking.

  A story with extraordinary heart, warmth and wisdom.

  Praise for Gravity is the Thing

  ‘Astonishingly wonderful and magical and moving and uplifting and DIFFERENT.’ Marian Keyes

  ‘A brilliant, beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, extraordinary book. I say this without bias, only awe.’ Liane Moriarty

  ‘Jaclyn Moriarty writes with such intimacy and charm, it’s like talking to your dream best friend. But then she weaves a story so compelling, and heartbreaking, and profound, it could only have come from an extraordinary writer.’ Laura Bloom

  ‘A thoughtful, beautifully written, truly original, and often hilarious meditation on loss, hope, the self-help industry, and the difficulties of navigating life on earth.’ Emily St. John Mandel

  Contents

  Cover

  About Gravity is the Thing

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part 2

  Reflections on 1990 by Abigail Sorensen

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 5

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part 6

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 7

  Reflections on 2000 by Abigail Sorensen

  Part 8

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 9

  Reflections on 2005 by Abigail Sorensen

  Part 10

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part 11

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 12

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part 13

  Chapter 1

  Part 14

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 15

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 16

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part 17

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgements

  About Jaclyn Moriarty

  Also by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Copyright page

  To my son, Charlie,

  to my sisters, Liane, Kati, Fiona and Nicola,

  to Nigel, and to my parents, family and friends,

  because you are all the point, and the magic.

  The motion of Animals is proportioned to their weight and structure. A flea can leap some hundred times its own length. Were an elephant, a camel or a horse to leap in the same proportion, their weight would crush them to atoms.

  The New South Wales Journal of Richard Atkins, 1792

  Two men are sitting—very quiet, motionless—one on either side of a gravel road. They are sitting on fold-out chairs. They face one another, across the gravel road. Their feet reach firmly to the dirt that lines the road.

  Each man is pointing upwards.

  Pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees; pointing with a straight, taut arm; pointing at an upwards that is somewhere high above the midpoint of the road.

  part

  1

  1.

  2010

  A tall man at the airstrip took my suitcase.

  He was tall in a long, lean, bony way, which he had tried to disguise with loose clothes. But at each gust of wind, the clothes clung fiercely, so that mostly he was out there on his own. A long, narrow flagpole of a man. He had a headful of curls, and these were unafraid. Crazed and rollicking, those curls.

  ‘Snow,’ he said, smiling, as he took my suitcase from me. I stared.

  I’ll step right into my story at this point. Abigail Sorensen, but you can call me Abi, thirty-five years old, a Capricorn, a nail-biter, former lawyer, owner/manager of the Happiness Café on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, mother of a four-year-old named Oscar—and this day—the day that I’m describing right no
w—well, it had started at 6 am.

  The taxi driver was twenty minutes late but this made him wild-eyed with excitement. ‘You’ll make your flight! I swear it on my mother’s life!’

  Traffic was backed up right across the Bridge and his enthusiasm dimmed. He frowned quietly, moving his hands around the steering wheel. He’d been a little reckless with his mother’s life: he saw that now.

  Then, just as we got into free, fast road and his spirits picked up, eyes wild again, there was an RBT stop.

  ‘Can you believe this?’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘Who’s drinking at this hour?’

  But the driver’s face darkened. ‘Who drinks at this hour? You do not know the half of it!’

  He was still moody when we pulled up at the airport. He’d lost all interest in my flight.

  At the Jetstar counter, a woman with sharp edges typed at a computer in a slow, measured way, my breathlessness filling up the quiet around the tapping. Without looking sideways, the woman tagged my suitcase and sent it away on a conveyor belt.

  So there went my suitcase—nervous, proud, excited—starting its journey alone, ahead of me.

  In Melbourne, I met up with my suitcase again. It’s just your regular, black vinyl case that can stand on its own two wheels and roll along, but I felt close to it, and protective, anyway. We took the train across the city, my suitcase and I, to the smaller airport at Moorabbin.

  The final leg of the journey made me uncomfortable, partly because I don’t like the expression ‘final leg’. Who started that, anyway? That dividing of rooms and people into feet, dividing of journeys into legs? The same person who tangled the ocean?

  Also, it was the smallest plane I’d ever seen; I didn’t know they made them that small. My suitcase would never fit, let alone me and that big pilot.

  ‘My luggage won’t bring the plane down, will it?’ I joked.

  The pilot turned a critical gaze on the suitcase. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What’s in it?’

  He tested its weight with one of his big arms, laughed softly, and got on with checking over the plane.

  It seemed like the kind of thing someone else should do, checking the plane—if we have to divide a journey into legs, we may as well divide it into fields of expertise. As it was, the whole thing seemed very Sunday-afternoon amateurish. He was saddling up his horse.

  That plane is not a horse!

  ‘She’s a twin-engine Cessna,’ the pilot called, which was unnerving.

  The letters OWW were printed on the aeroplane’s side, and I was thinking that this was a mistake when the other passenger turned up.

  ‘Don’t you think that’s tempting fate?’ I asked her, as she put her suitcase down beside me. ‘Or defining destiny? At some point, that plane is going to have to say oww.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said the woman beside me. Two words: ha ha. Difficult to interpret.

  ‘It’s going to fall out of the sky,’ I elaborated. ‘Or a missile’s going to hit it.’

  ‘Hm,’ the woman said, non-committal.

  She was maybe thinking that missiles were unlikely. This was just a flight to an island in Bass Strait, the stretch of water dividing the mainland from Tasmania.

  I will be honest with you: I had never once turned my mind to that stretch, nor to any islands it might contain, until just last week, when the invitation arrived. Turns out there are over fifty tiny, windswept islands in Bass Strait, including King Island (which I already knew: the cream and the brie) and Flinders (where, in 1830, they exiled the last of Tasmania’s Aboriginals). Taylor Island, where I was headed is south-east of Flinders, has a population of three hundred, a lighthouse, and is ‘renowned’ for its tiger snakes, muttonbirds and yellow-throated honeyeaters.

  After a moment of silence, the other passenger started talking.

  She was oblong-shaped, this passenger, dressed in a tangerine suit, and she said that her name was Pam.

  ‘Just plain Pam,’ she explained, ‘though wouldn’t I have killed to be called Pamela?’

  You wouldn’t have to kill someone. You could just change your name by deed poll.

  But I let it pass.

  Pam, it turned out, was a local of the island heading home after a holiday.

  Easily, her favourite part of her trip had been the Chinatown in Melbourne, because Pam was a lover of steamed pork dumplings, and a collector of bootleg DVDs.

  It was a four-and-a-half-hour flight, and we all fitted into the plane—the big pilot, me, Pam, the luggage—no trouble.

  Sometimes the pilot spoke into his radio: ‘Oscar Whisky Whisky, how do you read?’ his voice cool and low, and ‘how do you read’ forming a single word, ‘howdoyouread’. Each time he said it, I would think: How do I read? Well, I turn the pages, my eyes scan the letters, I . . . even though I tried to stop myself. Even when the joke got old.

  Pam kept shouting stories the whole way, only pausing when the pilot asked how to read. Pam told stories about chopsticks, and how she learned to use them, and strawberry farmers, and how they have bad teeth. (‘Oh, the stories I could tell!’ But you are, I thought.)

  It’s funny the way relationships can shift. Originally I had been the queen bee—making my humorous remarks about oww, while Pam was demure. But right away she had stepped up to take over the role. Maybe doubting my ability.

  At first, I ranged around for matching stories, but the effort of shouting them over the roar of the plane—or maybe the air outside was roaring?—either way, it made my stories increasingly pointless—unworthy—so I stopped talking, the way you do at nightclubs, and it was all just reaction: smile, frown, exclaim, or laugh at Pam.

  Pam seemed happy.

  But now here I was, standing on the airstrip on Taylor Island, and the tall man was saying, ‘Snow!’

  Just confusion, that was all I had left.

  ‘Snow’ could be a command. All visitors, on arrival at the island, are required, please, to snow.

  Or it could be the tall man’s name. In which case, I should shake his hand and say, ‘Sorensen. Abigail Sorensen.’

  There was a long, formal pause. The tall man’s smile faded. Creases settled into the edges of his eyes. Something seemed to cross his face—a mild incredulity, I realised, at the fact that I was standing there, staring at him.

  Then the tall man found his smile again and pointed to a sky that was heavy with cloud: ‘Snow,’ he repeated. ‘Any time now.’ And he turned away, still smiling.

  He swung my suitcase onto the back of a golf buggy, and gestured for me to climb aboard.

  I called goodbye to Pam and to the pilot. But Pam was crouching by an open suitcase, drawing out a long, black coat.

  The pilot was scratching at the plane’s fuselage. Maybe he’d seen sense about the OWW and was scratching off the letters.

  The path left the airstrip behind right away, leaning into curves like a yacht on a choppy sea. It carried the golf buggy through fields, sharp winds, and late afternoon.

  We passed a letterbox encrusted with dried starfish. A general store with an axe leaning up against its doorframe. A café with a chalkboard: Fish Stew and Mashed Potatoes.

  The ocean appeared now and then, grey and calm like an obliging old dog that shows up to walk by your side for short spells, but then disappears to explore.

  We took a corner and, across a field, two men sat on opposite sides of a gravel road. The men were on fold-out chairs. Each was pointing up. Each was pointing at an angle just above the midpoint of the road.

  The buggy turned another corner, and the pointing men were gone.

  I looked sideways, but the tall man’s hands were on the steering wheel, his eyes on the path ahead.

  2.

  The invitation had been printed on a shiny white notecard.

  You are invited to

  An all-expenses paid Retreat

  Where you will Learn the Truth about

  The Guidebook.

  The ‘Truth’ about The Guidebook! That made me la
ugh. A chapter from this book had been sent to me, out of the blue, when I was fifteen years old, and chapters had been arriving in the mail ever since. It was a self-help book that offered advice on how to live my life. I knew nothing about who was sending the excerpts (or why), other than that they called themselves ‘Rufus and Isabelle’.

  The invitation enclosed flight details and a promise that I would be collected from the airstrip and transported to the Hyacinth Guesthouse.

  Now, here I was at the guesthouse, and a woman was handing me a form. She was the manager, she said, and her name was Ellen. A name of pleasing symmetry (almost), and a pretty lilt when pronounced, this Ellen had fine white hair, and glasses with a pale pink chain that swooped down from each of her ears like curtains on a stage. After I filled in the form, Ellen glanced at it and said, ‘You’ll be turning thirty-six tomorrow, I see,’ which was quick—noticing my date of birth, and adding up the years like that so fast.

  Older people, I have noticed, are sharp-minded.

  ‘We’ve home-baked cake and coffee every afternoon,’ she continued, ‘in the lobby here. You’ve missed it today, but it being your first day, well, I set a slice aside for you, and I’ve just now put it in your room when I lit the fire.’

  She came out from behind the counter with a key.

  ‘Here we are then,’ she said. ‘You’re in room twelve.’ And she led me up three flights of stairs, my suitcase thumping behind me.

  We paused at each landing so she could point out the rugs.

  What? I almost thought. Do you mean me not to step on the rugs with my muddy boots? Or not to trip? Or do you just mean, Look—look at those beautiful rugs? But sometimes I get tired of my own confusion and over-analysis, and also I was fond of Ellen—the name, the birthday, the cake, the fireplace—so I was careful of the rugs, and smiled at them kindly, and I didn’t bother thinking anything.

  The room was warm and quiet.

  Ellen’s footsteps faded down the stairs, pausing at each landing. They slowed and paled into the distance, and so did the beating of my heart and the clamour of the day.

  The window felt cold to my fingertips. It looked over the ocean, which blended into sky and into dusk. The wind rustled the waves and the trees, and slapped something sharp against the glass.

  I stepped back and sat on the bed.

  Here I was, unexpectedly, in a warm, quiet room with dark floorboards. A tapestry rug in olive green on the floor; framed antique maps on the wall. My suitcase stood in the corner, and it seemed content. By the fireplace, a tiny table with elegant legs offered a slice of frosted cake.