Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  The police, Grandpa, Auntie Gem, the Grimshaws, my mother’s best friend Barbara, my boyfriend Peter, all of them staring at me, wondering, calculating.

  So I don’t know how that movie, Horton Hears a Who!, finished up. I made a giant stack of avocado sandwiches and then baked chocolate-banana muffins. (‘What is going on out there?’ Oscar called now and then. Sometimes he sounded stern, sometimes wistful.) I don’t know whether the people on the elephant’s speck of dust are safe or not. I expect they’re all fine in their happy, curly houses.

  6.

  There was nothing. Not a single clue. Robert had taken an overnight bag, his toothbrush and a few clothes, but nothing else. Enough to stay at Bing’s to practise piano; enough to stay at Clarissa’s in Glebe. Nobody had seen him. I mean, heaps of people had seen him; they were always calling up, breathless with the news. But it was never him, or if it was, he was gone before we got there.

  Meanwhile, the chapters from The Guidebook arrived every other week.

  Sometimes I stared at them, astonished, or I laughed bitterly. Here’s an example of one that made me sneer:

  Chapter 12

  I want to begin by recommending the apple.

  Honestly, it brightens the mind.

  The apple. I looked around to tell Robert how preposterous it was, these people offering an apple when Robert was missing.

  Again, I had nothing but contempt for these two chapters:

  Chapter 87

  Learn French or Spanish. Or maybe Japanese? You can get a set of tapes at the library.

  Write a daily letter to yourself (in English) explaining just how wonderful you are. Seal it in an envelope. A little later, open it!

  Chapter 33

  Listen to music, play music, keep music in your life at all times! Also: water. Immerse yourself in water, run your hands under water, drink water. Also: colour. Listen to colour, look at colour, keep colour in your life at all times. And finally: conversation. Stand beneath the eaves and let them drop. That is to say, listen in to conversations. Try not to be noticed doing this, as it is considered rude.

  I ignored the instructions and advice, shredded the pages, but now and then a chapter made me howl again.

  Chapter 26

  Oh God, and sometimes you miss somebody. And your body aches, restless with it. The window is open, the rain-green grass outside, and his shirt is over the back of the chair and it’s shifting, agitated by the wind.

  7.

  We found out that Robert been working the night shift in a twenty-four-hour supermarket near Clarissa’s place. Whenever I thought he was at Clarissa’s, after they had broken up, and my parents thought he was at friends’ places, that’s what he’d been doing. He must have saved hundreds of dollars. So he had cash. This struck us all as good news. He wasn’t starving on the streets. He was in a youth hostel somewhere, we decided.

  But he didn’t telephone or send a postcard.

  One day, I arrived home from school in a daze because Mandy Kirkerwal had walked by my desk in maths and whispered: ‘I know how you feel. I’ve lost my cat.’

  I opened the front door and, as usual, tore around the house looking for Robert. Or for signs of Robert: his bed rumpled, his backpack on the floor, big shoes kicked across his floor.

  Then I played back the answering machine even though the light wasn’t flashing.

  Next I checked the mail in case he’d written.

  He hadn’t, but there was another envelope from The Guidebook.

  I was glad to see the envelope. It would be something I could slowly, methodically destroy. I opened it, low-level snarl carved into my face, and I read:

  Chapter 62

  We want you to think about the number 3.

  Close your eyes and count to 3, count back from 3, reflect on 3, write the number 3 on a piece of paper and stare at it a while.

  And now tell us this: do you know the Rule of 3?

  You can survive for 3 minutes without air, or in icy waters.

  You can survive for 3 hours without shelter in a harsh environment.

  You can survive for 3 days without water.

  You can survive for 3 weeks without food.

  Take the number 3. It is survival.

  That was The Guidebook and its sleight of hand again. I’m standing there, dazed, ready to shred it, and it leaps at me with grabby hands and shreds my daze instead.

  I was hyperventilating. Shivering so hard my muscles hurt.

  I was appalled that this hadn’t occurred to me before but here it was: I could not survive without my brother.

  Couldn’t do it. Not a chance.

  Not for 3 weeks, not 3 days, not 3 hours, not 3 minutes.

  The number 3 bounced around my vision, flashing lights and pixels.

  I stumbled. I let myself fall to the floor, ready for the logical conclusion. I spared a moment’s thought for my poor parents, one child missing, and now they’d come home and find me dead. My breath came in rasps, and sometimes alarming silences. I was repeatedly convinced that my windpipe had snapped.

  Then I caught sight of something sitting on the kitchen bench. It was small, blue and white.

  Oh cool, I thought. Bounty.

  I stood up from the floor, reached for it, and ate it. Robert will be fine, I thought, Robert will be back, as I smiled and ate, enjoying the soft sweet melt of coconut.

  Which I suppose was a survival mechanism in itself: the ability to be cheered by a minor, unexpected pleasure, a chocolate-covered coconut treat, while on the very precipice of death.

  Or it was some deep flaw in my character, I decided, coupled with a fondness for Bounty bars.

  8.

  Six months went by.

  I was suspended from school for nearly blinding a teacher.

  Speaking generally, I became ruthless and so did my parents. The three of us tore all over the state putting up posters, and tore through our friends like tornadoes, snatching them up and tossing them aside.

  But they deserved it.

  First, Mum stopped speaking to her best friend Barbara. They’d been friends since high school. They’d hitchhiked to the Gold Coast together as seventeen-year-olds, been each other’s chief bridesmaid, godmother to the other’s first baby and so on. Barbara had been coming over almost every day since Robert disappeared, bringing packets of strawberry sponge fingers, and talking a lot about her sister-in-law. This sister-in-law was related to the attorney-general in some remote way, and Barbara’s plan was to use this access point to speak directly, personally, to the attorney-general and demand that every police officer on the force get out there and look for Robert.

  The first time she said this, I felt confused: Well, aren’t they? (I thought). Isn’t every police officer in the country looking for Robert right now?

  Even though I knew that wasn’t true. Then I felt glad that Barbara was going to make it true, at the same time that it struck me as wildly unlikely. The police had other things to do. I knew that much.

  Nevertheless, she continued promoting her intended personal conversation. It was always future tense. Eventually I saw it would never take place.

  One day, walking down the hallway to the kitchen, I heard Barbara say in a low voice: ‘Do you ever think this is maybe for the best?’

  There was a clumping sound. I think Mum was putting the kettle on to boil and she’d clumped it down quite hard.

  ‘Um . . .’ Mum said, almost a teasing tone in her bewilderment.

  ‘I mean, because of his illness. If he’d gone downhill quickly, you’d be having to reconfigure your whole house. You’d be building ramps down the front porch steps.’

  I was in the kitchen doorway at this point, staring at Barbara, who was looking through the front window at the steps.

  Mum was silent. She was reaching for the teacups.

  There was a lot she could have said. For example: MS affects people in many different ways, Barbara, and Robert might have been fine for years, forever even. He might never ha
ve required a wheelchair.

  And she could have said: What kind of a breathtakingly fucked-up world do you think we live in, Barbara, where we’d prefer Robert to vanish from our lives than to have to build a fucking ramp?

  I was predicting the second option.

  But Mum’s voice was thrillingly polite. ‘Yes, good point, Barbara,’ she said. ‘It’s far better that he’s out there on his own, building his own ramps.’

  Then she asked Barbara to leave.

  Actually, even before Mum started speaking, Barbara was apologising, backtracking, trying to reel her words back in: she didn’t know what she was saying, she was out of her mind with worry, she was clutching at straws.

  I think now that Barbara had been coming over so often, and saying the same thing about her sister-in-law and the attorney-general so much, that she was sick of herself. She was trying a new angle. She should maybe have tried it out in her own mind first, before saying it aloud.

  But Mum never forgave her. Neither did I. This was annoying because she stopped sending me cheques for fifty dollars on my birthday, from your godmother, Barbara.

  A day or so later, Dad came home from work and said he’d got into a shouting match with his best buddy at work, Tony Stabback, because Tony had mentioned that it was a waste of police time to be hunting down drug-addicted teens.

  Dad had told him to eff off.

  Tony said, No, no, you misunderstand, I’m not making a reference to Robert here! But he knew that Robert went to dance parties and took ecstasy, because Dad had told him about this not long before, so Dad was not convinced, and he came ‘this close’ to taking Tony out.

  They didn’t make up until years later, when Tony got stomach cancer and was dying. Dad visited him in the hospital and apparently they hugged.

  Meanwhile, I stopped speaking to exactly three-quarters of my school friends, broke up with my boyfriend, Peter, and fell out with my best friend, Carly Grimshaw.

  The school friends I stopped speaking to because it turned out they were stupid. That really surprised me. I’d always thought I had smart friends.

  They got merit awards and knew who the prime minister was and worried about rainforests.

  But Tina Amagetti said, ‘Look. About your brother. You know in your heart where he is, Abi. You have to trust your instincts. So . . . where is he?’

  Vicki Livingstone said, ‘It’s been six months. You have to let it go. It’s time.’

  And Mia Sun, who got high distinctions in the maths and science competitions every year, suggested we hold a séance to see if we could get in touch with him. ‘At least that way you’ll know if he’s dead or alive, right? You’ll get closure.’

  Idiots.

  I couldn’t even look at them.

  Interestingly, that left me with a couple of girls I’d always thought of as the daft ones. Mish Choo, for example, never knew what was going on at school. ‘Wait, we were supposed to read that?’ she would gasp, about a book we’d been studying for half a term already. Whenever a teacher issued complicated instructions, we’d all look around at Mish because we knew she’d be doing her hilarious thing, her face swimming in circles of confusion.

  But Mish kept saying the right thing. ‘He’ll be back, Abi. I promise.’

  Kirrily Palmer had recently been diagnosed with dyslexia, so we were only just becoming accustomed to the fact that she wasn’t daft at all, but actually very intelligent. She would say, ‘You still don’t have any news, do you? Holy mother-freaking cocksucker!’ She looked up dictionaries of profanities, found expletives in other languages and curses from medieval times, all for me. That was also perfect.

  I broke up with Peter because he used the word heel.

  Whenever I saw him, he’d give me a brooding, tragic look, wrap me in his arms and say, ‘The latest?’ I’d shake my head, and he’d hug me tighter. Stop it, I’d think, you’re hurting me. Or: Stop it, I need to be free to look for Robert.

  After a few minutes, he would stop hugging me, relax his hold on tragedy and initiate regular conversation about music, books, movies, philosophy—the things I had previously loved conversing about with him. Once, I saw him glance at his watch while in the brooding, hugging segment, and it occurred to me that he had allocated himself a five-minute slot for sadness and was checking whether the time was up.

  Meanwhile, he continued using peculiar historical phrases like ‘chip chip’. Possibly it was ‘pip pip’. Either way, I wanted to kill him for that phrase. I was going to take that phrase and snap it over my knee. In addition, his tennis was erratic. I kept shooting scowls at him on the court, then quickly pretending I was only joking.

  One day, he said something about wearing jodhpurs and I said, ‘You are a walking anachronism,’ and quickly assumed my cute, just joking look. He laughed as if we were having a good, flirty moment. Meanwhile, I made a decision that the next time he used an historic phrase or word I would break up with him.

  Exactly one minute later he said, ‘I feel like such a heel, I left my—’ I never found out what he left, or where, because I said, ‘Peter, this isn’t working out.’

  He cried!

  It was a shock, and I felt bad for him. But then he squeezed my hand, which hurt because I’d ripped off a fingernail with my teeth and made it bleed, and he started saying that he knew this was about Robert, and that he wasn’t going anywhere, he promised.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This has nothing to do with Robert. You might like to think that, because it makes you feel better, but you have a right to know the truth—and the truth is, I just can’t stand to be with you.’

  And I walked away.

  That brings me to my best friend, Carly Grimshaw. Around this time, Carly and I would hang out on her four-poster bed and come up with explanations for where Robert was. We knew he was somewhere because of the lies about Clarissa and Bing, and we lay on her bed eating Twisties and inventing narratives. Usually, we gave him amnesia. He was always safe and comfortable, and his memory was elbowing its way back at that very moment.

  Then we discussed exactly how we’d feel when he returned. Euphoric acid would course through our veins, we said. Then we would start a band of the same name. Quickly, we’d learn musical instruments—Carly played the flute and I played the piano but neither was hard-core enough; we were going to learn electric guitar and sax, and Robert would be on drums.

  I loved how Carly got right to the heart, the absolute truth, of Robert coming back.

  Only, one day she said to me, ‘Well, it’s like they say, Abi. Every cloud has a silver lining.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  It was good for me to find my independence, she explained. Sometimes, she said, she used to miss me, because Robert and I were so often together, as if Robert was my best friend instead of her, so this absence of Robert was giving us space to—

  I don’t know. I missed the next bit. I was spilling Twisties everywhere trying to get up off her bed, to get away from her, and I was shouting—using the curses that Kirrily Palmer had taught me—and running out of her bedroom.

  That day was the first time I wondered if The Guidebook might actually be a manifestation of my own thoughts. Because when I got home, crying angrily, I saw an envelope in the frying pan, opened it, and the first thing I read was: Every cloud has a silver lining.

  My chest did one of those dramatic tumbles down a flight of stairs.

  Chapter 79

  Every cloud has a silver lining. No. Every cloud does not. Because, look, I’ve seen clouds without a single trace of silver. I’ve seen clouds of pure white. Or violent purple. Clouds that are nothing more than lethargic wisps.

  Also, if you see a silver lining, it’s actually just a shot of grey.

  Silver linings merely indicate the possibility of rain. Too bad if you’re hoping to go fishing. Or if it’s your wedding day.

  It carried on in this vein, querying the origin of the phrase (Milton), defining ‘linings’ and discussing skirts.

  This w
as also the first time I realised that the authors of the book, Rufus and Isabelle, were taking it in turns to write the chapters. Two days later, Chapter 80 arrived (which was surprising: they never usually turned up in consecutive order) and it specifically referred to Isabelle having written the previous chapter, whereas now (the chapter said), it was ‘my turn’.

  For some reason, the coincidence with The Guidebook made me go to Carly’s place and make up with her. She apologised and we hung out with her cute little sister, Rabbit, helping Rabbit to make a cubby house under her cot, and introducing all of Rabbit’s toys into this cubby house, until we were crowded with teddy bears and hard-edged trains, and we looked at each other, Carly and I, tears running down our faces, and we cheered right up.

  9.

  My mother had a job at the Department of Education and her boss permitted her extended leave to look for her son.

  After about a year, he seemed to think she’d looked for long enough.

  ‘What, you think I should give up?’ she demanded.

  ‘Of course not! Never! Just, maybe, look in your spare time?’

  That was how the conversation went, according to my mother. ‘As if Robert being missing is a hobby of mine,’ she said.

  She resigned. Her days were too full for work: she spent them at support groups and libraries, at the printers and ‘pounding the pavements’. She travelled right up the east coast, staying in caravan parks and youth hostels, asking questions, handing out leaflets. Now and then people would agree they’d seen him, and there’d be a flourish of hope. A clairvoyant called to say she’d seen Robert in a pinball parlour in South Australia and Mum followed up on this, until another clairvoyant swore he was in a treehouse in Brisbane. Eventually, she learned to ignore the spiritualists and crank callers. She became extremely skinny: her skin was tightly fitted to her face now, releasing many new wrinkles.