Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  The guy on the phone was obliging. He tracked down Clarissa’s new number for me. I found his voice sexy, warm and supercool. University student, I thought. If Robert can have one, why can’t I?

  Then I remembered my boyfriend, Peter. I smiled suddenly, thinking of him. He ought to call for my birthday soon.

  I dialled the number that the sexy, warm, supercool guy had given me, resuming my angry thoughts about Robert having missed our ritual last night. I was ready to be strident, to really explain to Robert that it was, well, it was my birthday. I was going to tell him I’d stayed up until 5 am waiting. I was excited about that part, and felt it fevering away, the climax of my speech.

  Clarissa answered this time. I recognised her voice. I’d met her a couple of times at parties, and once at the train station with Robert.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘Robert’s not here. We broke up a couple of months ago, actually. Didn’t you know?’

  I told her that now I was mad at Robert for two things: one, for not being here on my birthday, and two, for not telling me he’d broken up with Clarissa. She laughed like I was being witty, but I wasn’t, I really was mad. I couldn’t piece together from her tone why they’d split up. She said we should hang out sometime, and I thought: Really? That depends on the story here. Could be a loyalty issue.

  But out loud I said, ‘Yeah! We should.’

  I put down the phone.

  Mum and Dad were coming in from outside, carrying their cups and stacked plates.

  ‘Any news?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Oh, he and Bing had walked down to the shops,’ I said. ‘Bing’s mum said she’d get him to call me when they’re back.’

  Mum nodded vaguely. Dad opened the fridge to put the milk away, then stopped. We used to have this list of words on the fridge, Robert and I. We were working on our vocabulary, so each week we’d write down five words along with their definitions. I seem to remember we’d lost the L–Z volume of the dictionary at that time, so the words were all from A–K. I think frangible was there that day.

  Also incipient.

  So Dad paused with the milk in one hand, the other hand holding the fridge door ajar, and he studied our list.

  ‘I have incipient anxiety,’ he said.

  I looked at him, startled. ‘What?’

  ‘Well.’ His brow crinkled. ‘It’s just this strange sense of foreboding that I have.’

  Then he put the milk away, closed the fridge and grinned, his expression like: It’s cool! I’m just fooling around.

  2.

  Much of my sixteenth birthday was wasted being furious with Robert, at the same time as secretly thinking that his absence meant a surprise party for me, at the same time as being faintly frightened that something was wrong.

  If someone is not where he says he is, is he a missing person or a liar?

  Peter phoned and said, ‘Many happy returns,’ which was his quaint way. I took the call in my parents’ room, with the door closed, and told him all about Robert. He seemed to think it was awesome.

  We didn’t use the word awesome in those days: I’m translating his reaction for the modern reader.

  Basically, he laughed with delight—he’s not at Bing’s! he’s not at Clarissa’s!—as if this were a magic trick Robert was performing, or a detective story with unexpected twists. Peter instructed me to call him if anything else unfolded but said that otherwise he’d see me tonight.

  We were going out for Chinese for my birthday: Mum, Dad, Robert, Peter and me.

  ‘What if Robert doesn’t turn up for that either?’ I asked.

  ‘Whoa,’ Peter said, like that was the coolest suggestion ever. Or like he needed his horse to slow down. One or the other. Then he hung up.

  I played with the phone dial, spinning it and letting it fall back, thinking angry thoughts about how Robert was confusing my birthday, and happy thoughts about my upcoming surprise party.

  If he didn’t turn up in time for the birthday dinner, was I meant to cover for him again? I mean, how far did he want to take this thing? Also, what if he was now lost at sea and about to be eaten by a shark? Shouldn’t I tell my parents so we could swim out and save him?

  But if this was part of a surprise party plan, I’d feel such a fool for worrying. I should just play it cool.

  But the shark! Or maybe a lion?

  Back and forth I went, all the time heading grimly towards my birthday dinner, where I feared I would have to tackle the ultimate moral dilemma.

  It turned out I didn’t have to tackle it.

  I was getting ready for the birthday dinner when Mum knocked on my bedroom door, a glinty look in her eye. ‘So I’m down at the shops picking up your birthday cake,’ she said, smile growing like she’s heading for the punchline, ‘when who do I run into but Bing’s mother!’

  That’s when it started to unravel.

  Afterwards, I sometimes thought that everything would have been okay—that Robert would have skidded up the driveway on time for my birthday dinner with a black eye, arm in plaster and a story about having secretly entered a skateboard competition and stacked it doing a three-sixty—if only Mum hadn’t run into Bing’s mother down at the shops.

  But she did, so now she knew Robert had not been at Bing’s, so now I admitted he’d told me he was at his girlfriend’s place in Glebe, so now there was fanfare about the girlfriend in Glebe—which was a red herring, I kept telling them, irrelevant, barking up the wrong tree—because they’d broken up and he wasn’t there at all . . .

  Once I had them back on track, there were many phone calls, always circling back on Bing and Clarissa, the false stories, the false trails, and me trying to get people back on course, and now it was the next day, and we were searching his bedroom, and his favourite coat was gone—and now Mum was sure we’d given that away to Vinnies a year ago, so it wasn’t gone, or not really gone, and now we were arguing about whether he’d have done that—whether he’d have given away his favourite coat—and now my dad was calling the police.

  3.

  My mother likes to recite conversations; she’s a human listening device. So he said, and then I said, and then Robert pointed out. When she told me about Robert’s MS diagnosis, it was as if I was in the doctor’s office with them, Robert in one chair, Mum beside him, Dr Lee across the big desk, the window lit behind him, a framed photograph of his two grown children on his desk.

  ‘You might have been feeling extremely tired,’ Dr Lee said. ‘You might have been confused, your arms or legs might have felt numb, you might have tripped or stumbled, you might have felt dizzy. Does any of this ring true?’

  All the symptoms, scrolling out across the doctor’s office, across Robert’s room as Mum talked. And here they came! All the little moments: Robert falling asleep at Grandma’s eightieth birthday party, Robert sitting astride the brick wall at the skate park and slowly tipping sideways, Robert rubbing the feeling back into his arm. Falling down at the edge of the ocean. I could see it in my mother’s eyes, my brother’s eyes, my own eyes—to the extent that you can see your own eyes.

  It was like when they open a new register in a supermarket, and here come the shoppers swarming right to it. It’s pleasing, at first: like a question and a rush of answers. A magnet drawing pins, a collection, a list, a robust set of examples.

  But then it’s just a waiting crowd and one tired cashier.

  When the search for Robert started properly, it was similar: a swarm rushing at the problem. People and suggestions gathering. He must be with another friend, another girlfriend! Everyone had ideas: his friends, our relatives, my dad’s two brothers, my mum’s sister, the cousins, they all knew exactly where he was. The police heard the story and smiled in their wise, grim, world-weary way and promised he would be back.

  Then the crowd of suggestions became restless, rowdy and, quite frankly, ridiculous. Maybe he’d had an accident! His MS symptoms caused the accident—vertigo made him trip or fall over a cliff–. No, the MS made him clinically depressed and
suicidal, made him run away from home!

  We chased the wild-Robert angle, the post-Clarissa-break-up angle, the depressed-Robert, the sick-Robert. We chased accidents in hospitals across the state. We spun around and chased the wildness of my parents’ parenting, its wilderness.

  Sometimes I thought MS was getting way too much attention, at other times I thought not enough. We kept racing down streets that curved back on themselves; following intertwined mazes.

  After a while, the police paid attention. They finally agreed to file a missing persons report—only they called it a Person of Interest form, which we all found unsatisfactorily vague. ‘He’s more than interesting! He’s lost!’ Later, we found out that Robert, being fifteen and unwell, was technically a ‘person at risk’: they should have circulated his details immediately. But until we met Officer Matilda Jakopin, who took the details for the report from us, and therefore automatically became our caseworker, all the police we spoke with were languid, dismissive. One officer lectured us on the scarcity of police resources, and the wastefulness of employing police to hunt for recalcitrant teens who always made their way home. On the one hand, we wanted to tear this guy apart; on the other that phrase—always made their way home—was beautifully soothing.

  4.

  Our caseworker, Matilda Jakopin, had a bland face and thin fair hair. She was asthmatic and always seemed to have a catch of phlegm in her throat. It made me want to cough for her. At first, we complained to each other that she was useless, weak, insipid, and ought to use a Ventolin inhaler. I secretly wished we’d got a big, burly man.

  But it quickly emerged that Matilda was a straight talker with a colourful, profane vocabulary. This reassured us.

  She swore most vividly about the officer who’d lectured us on wasted resources. ‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘It’s the hours right after they disappear, those are the crucial ones.’

  We knew that Robert’s report had been sent to the Missing Persons Unit, which I found encouraging, but Matilda explained that this was basically five plainclothes officers who kept records of missing people. ‘If you’re lucky,’ she said, ‘your liaison from the unit will go in to bat for you—get out on the street, do the interviews.’ She knocked on my mother’s shoulder. ‘I’ll fight for you,’ she promised. ‘I won’t quit. But you’ve all got to get out there yourselves. It pisses me off, I tell you. The whole thing.’

  We all fell in love with Matilda.

  At everyone else, we were mad. We were madly searching, and we were mad at the concept of searching. Mum and I had good, intense exchanges about that.

  ‘How do you search for a person?’ we kept demanding, focused and angry. ‘It’s not like you can look behind the couch!’

  We wanted to be walking up and down streets, opening every door, searching behind everybody’s couch. But you can’t. You’re not allowed.

  If you knocked on a stranger’s door and said, ‘I’d like to check if my brother is in here, please,’ they’d say, ‘Uh, no. He’s not.’

  But you want to shove them out of the way, head down their front hall, check their closets, the top of their fridge, under the workbench in their garage.

  We asked people, phoned people, everyone we knew and everyone they knew. I called a second cousin we hadn’t seen since we were three. ‘Just wondering if you’ve seen Robert?’ And I felt stupid, like asking was admitting to carelessness but, worse, it was exposing my own desperation, which itself made the desperation real.

  My grandfather lived in Maroochydore, on the Sunshine Coast, and it seemed like an obvious place for a boy to run away to, so everybody kept suggesting Grandpa. I called him every day for a fortnight to see if Robert had turned up yet, until Grandpa swore on his black opal, which he’d won in a bet back in ’63, that he’d phone me the second Robert got there.

  The lies to my parents about being at Bing’s, or to me about being at Clarissa’s, cheered us up. It meant he must have had another plan. There was a strategy at work behind the scenes. Any moment he would pounce with his denouement.

  ‘He must be somewhere,’ we said to one another, whenever we remembered the lies, as when you know that the keys are somewhere in the house, because you used them to get yourself inside.

  We put leaflets in letterboxes, ads in the papers asking him to please come home. Signs on telegraph poles: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?

  You’re a lost cat, I told Robert in my head, ready to laugh with him about it.

  At first I chose photos in which he looked supercool, so he’d be grateful, but sometimes I chose pictures of him looking dorky, tea towels knotted around his biceps, or blowing a mediocre pink bubble.

  See what you get for doing this! I thought vengefully.

  Also, I thought it would make him come running to tear the pictures down.

  Mum called that radio guy, John Laws, one day and told the story, and he was nice to her, as were the people who called in afterwards. For two days she was happy, thinking John Laws was on the case.

  Matilda came by for coffee and talked to Mum about the media angle. ‘You want to remember that he’ll probably come back,’ she said, stirring three heaped teaspoons of sugar into her coffee. ‘So there’s his privacy to think about. His health is an angle, but is it an angle we want to use?’

  She got us a double-page spread in the Women’s Weekly. ‘It’s good he’s such a beautiful kid,’ she said, smiling and wheezing at the photographs we’d chosen. ‘That helps a lot. With boys, the problem is, people think they’re tough, indestructible. We worry about girls, but we think boys can take care of themselves. Kind of sexist, to be honest. But your boy has such a sweet face. He’s a handsome one, that’s helpful.’

  We loved her even more.

  We spent the summer looking, including Christmas Day, and then school started again.

  I had no plans to go to school, but Mum said maybe somebody there would know something. I should keep an ear out, she said, ask questions. So I went back to school, but only as an undercover cop.

  I remember seeing Bing crying in the schoolyard. He was crying for his missing best friend, for the eisteddfod that had come and gone without him, or he was crying because he’d agreed to cover for Robert, without knowing why, or because, when Bing’s dad found out about the cover-up, he’d shouted at Bing in Malaysian and pointed upstairs, so that Bing bowed his head, and disappeared upstairs to his room. I was there when that happened, my parents and me in their living room. I was amazed, and also deeply embarrassed for Bing.

  I don’t know. I guess that’s why Bing was crying in the schoolyard. Maybe he’d just failed an exam. I know it really bothered me, seeing him take off his glasses and wipe his eyes with his shirtsleeve, and then wipe them again and again.

  5.

  There’s a movie you might know called Horton Hears a Who!—it was a book first, by Dr Seuss, before it was a movie—and I was watching it with Oscar at home last year.

  An elephant finds a speck of dust. That is the movie in a nutshell.

  About ten minutes in, I couldn’t watch another minute. I had to leave the room.

  ‘Oscar,’ I said, ‘I have to make you an avocado sandwich.’

  ‘Yes,’ Oscar said agreeably.

  But I had to leave the room because inside that speck of dust—well, inside it there was a world of zany, happy people living busy lives in curly houses—but for me, inside that speck of dust was myself, aged sixteen, standing in my kitchen howling.

  Three months after Robert’s disappearance, I was home alone, staring at the phone, waiting for Robert to ring, urging him to ring, sending fierce or polite or ice-cold-James-Bond-villain-style messages out into the universe—and I let my gaze wander. An envelope sat in the frying pan.

  Another Guidebook chapter. I opened it.

  Chapter 56

  Say you are a teapot.

  No.

  Say you are a china teapot on a ledge, faint crack running around your base, so faint it might not be a crack, it might be a tea
stain or a hair, and—

  No, no, no.

  Say you are the dust on a butterfly wing, and say that the butterfly’s in flight; now, say that the butterfly is banking steep and say that you feel yourself slide. Can you cling to the butterfly wing? Or will you slip, speck of dust, through the still kitchen air to the bubble wrap happenstance below? The bubble wrap abandoned on the kitchen floor, which once wrapped a teapot on a ledge?

  Say what you are.

  That’s our point.

  What are you, dear reader? What exactly are you?

  Tell us what you are.

  I howled. I read those words and the howl crept up my spine, and out through my throat and wrenched itself out into the world before I noticed it. The words were an arrow, they got me in the chest and tore a handy hole for the howl.

  I was howling words: What am I, what am I, what am I? What exactly AM I?

  Because that was the point, exactly. Who was I? Who was I? What was I?

  Now, interestingly, I was sixteen, and maybe that’s a question that all sixteen-year-olds ask themselves, from time to time. Maybe they also howl and sob, enjoying the drama of their existential crisis and the shaping of identity and whatnot.

  But for me, there were only two answers to the question.

  (a) I was Robert’s sister, which is to say I was Robert’s best friend, the other half of Robert, so close to Robert that he’d never ever leave without telling me exactly where he was going.

  (b) I was Robert’s sister, but it turned out we were not all that close, I was not all that important, I was irrelevant to him, he was indifferent to me, maybe even hated me a little, and so he’d run away without a word.

  If (a) was true, Robert must be dead. If (b) was true, my life had been a lie.

  I was standing in the kitchen, staring at my palms, each palm holding an impossible identity, asking myself which one was me. It came to me that everybody else had already seen this dilemma: everybody knew that I was the yardstick, the touchstone, benchmark, barometer. My parents often looked at me, and now I knew they were actually assessing: Which one are you, Abigail? What’s the truth?