Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  Dad agreed that she should make finding Robert her full-time job, but she wanted to cover the costs of advertisements and private detectives herself, so now and then she’d get some kind of part-time work.

  For a while, she tutored children with a b–d reversal problem. I’d come home from school hoping for Robert and, instead, there’d be a stranger’s child sitting at the dining room table alongside Mum, eating green grapes and thinly sliced pear from a saucer (‘Natural sugars bring the brain to life,’ my mother said), and leaning over an exercise book with a pencil. They’d do b for pages, then pages of d. They’d decorate b’s and d’s, colour them in, give them dragon wings, before they got down to the brass tacks of words: boat, bat, butter, ball, dart, dim, down. They all learned the difference in the end, the kids, the difference between b and d.

  It strikes me now that they’d probably have figured it out eventually, with or without my mother’s help; also, that this was a fairly narrow field of specialisation she had going on, my mother.

  Around this time, Mum sent me to see her counsellor, a woman named Éclair . . . no, that can’t have been her name. I’m thinking of the chocolate éclair I had after my session with her. Her name was Renee, and she wore a lot of make-up, including purple lipstick. Renee sat in an armchair and a shaft of sunlight, and said: ‘You’re holding on to two truths, aren’t you? It’s like your heart is split in two.’

  I was quiet, thinking about that, and then I decided to speak my mind. ‘It’s more than that,’ I said. ‘It’s like I’ve got two hearts, and both of them are full—like, absolutely full, so full they sometimes spill. Because I know absolutely that Robert will be back, and I also know for sure that he won’t. He never will.’

  Renee nodded, her eyes very sad, and I burst into tears. I sat there crying, crying.

  I told her about all the many stupid things people said, and she shook her head, exasperated with these people. I told her about the friends who said he must be dead, and she became stern and said, ‘Nobody knows. Nobody can say that for sure.’

  Afterwards, I was starving and ate the chocolate éclair. I’d have liked to go back to see Renee again but Mum never suggested it. I think she thought I was done now: b–d reversal problem solved in a single session.

  But they still sat there, side by side, b and d. The exact same thing but opposite, facing one another and pointing to the truth, which was nothing but a giant blank.

  10.

  You hear people talk about how it’s a turning point when you realise that your parents are human.

  It’s also a turning point to realise that they’re not. The sounds I heard my parents make when they thought they were alone—rasping wails like animals, or something else not-human, lacerating sounds. I made sounds like this myself, too, when I thought my darkest thoughts, like Robert was never coming back, and vicious thoughts, the secret, terrible thoughts about Robert having been stolen, taken, starved, attacked, raped, about Robert slipping over a cliff’s edge and dying a long desperate death, about Robert pleading for us to rescue him, about—I will stop this here.

  While I was studying for the HSC, my parents were fighting.

  People seemed to think this was natural, for them to fight, which irritated the hell out of me. Apart from anything else, I felt embarrassed by their predictability.

  For a while, they circled the issue of their liberal parenting—reassuring each other that Robert’s disappearance had nothing to do with that, or holding each other close and saying, ‘Why weren’t we more strict? Why? Why?’—until Mum said she’d opposed it all along. Free-range parenting had been Dad’s idea, she announced, and she’d only gone along with it for his sake.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ Dad said.

  She said it again the next day, and she kept on saying it, in a soft, sad voice, or a friendly, regretful voice, or a low, resentful voice, and Dad continued to proclaim that this was the first he’d heard of it.

  ‘It always troubled me,’ Mum asserted. ‘I wanted to keep a closer eye on them.’

  I was thinking: Well, why didn’t you then? I was thinking: Stand up for yourself, Mum; you were a parent too!

  This was more or less Dad’s position as well. ‘If you disagreed, why didn’t you say something?’

  I began to feel sorry for Mum, given the flimsiness of her angle. One day a chapter from The Guidebook arrived and it said this:

  Chapter 42

  Raising teenagers is all about deception.

  Give teenagers the illusion of freedom. It’s like when you’re playing the triangle. If you clutch the bar, it will make an ugly clang. However, if you dangle the triangle in the air from a fine, fine string, it will chime out its sweetness. It believes it is free, you see, even though you’ve got it by the string. Convince the triangle it is free.

  I showed this to Mum, thinking, in some bizarre twist of my mind, that it would comfort her. Because Robert had a sweet voice when he sang, a little like a triangle perhaps, and so giving him freedom had been the right thing. I was going to say that I honestly thought Robert running away had nothing to do with us having freedom. In fact, I planned to say, kids were more likely to run if you tried to restrict them. Robert’s disappearance was an aberration.

  I didn’t get a chance to say any of this because Mum read the chapter and said, ‘Throw it away. Just throw it away,’ and she flung the page. I could see that it was not satisfactory to her, the flinging, as the paper moved lethargically, drifting towards the ground. I caught it and took it away.

  Later that night, I read it again and realised that my parents had forgotten to give us the illusion of freedom: they had given us actual freedom. Urgently, I thought: They need the string—they should be holding the string! If they’d just tied a string around Robert’s ankle, they could drag him home right now!

  I saw it so vividly, the string, and here came Robert, cartwheeling home like a wayward kite.

  Then I was filled with rage towards my mother for not having insisted on a string, and I wondered why I’d ever wanted to comfort her.

  11.

  Time carried on. You can’t divert it from its tracks.

  I myself was walking alongside the tracks, however, not on them, and I despised everybody who used the word miss.

  I missed the bus.

  I miss my grandma—she’s gone back to Scotland now.

  You know what I miss? That milk bar on the corner of Clyve and Scott Streets.

  As if anybody knew the meaning of the word miss other than me.

  I finished school and started Arts/Law at Sydney University. My ambition to write horror movies had dissolved. Instead, I was going to be a lawyer and fight for justice for the families of missing people.

  I felt strongly about that, without knowing exactly what I meant by it.

  part

  5

  1.

  Early English settlement of Sydney started on the south side of the harbour, and spread west, east and south from there.

  I live on the north side of the harbour. Warung, the Aboriginals called it, meaning ‘the other side’. There’s a powerful otherness here, the Harbour Bridge a psychological barrier. Those across the water are contemptuous or mocking of the protected, golden life of the north (so that I rush to say that I grew up in the west, in Stanmore, to give myself street cred). Embraced a century ago by a bohemian community of painters and authors who built Arts and Craft houses and planted gardens, the Lower North Shore is now a collection of suburbs: McMahons Point (where I work), Kirribilli, Lavender Bay, Waverton, North Sydney, Cremorne and Neutral Bay (where I live).

  Leafy doesn’t cut it for my neighbourhood. There are great swathes of green: apple green, lime green; green swept up and over fences, massive established trees, figs and gums, spreading extravagant branches; camellia, magnolia, bougainvillea, jacaranda, frangipani, bird-of-paradise, and everywhere the cascade palm, cabbage tree palm and golden cane palm. When I first moved here, I used to walk Oscar in his pram alo
ng the cracked and lopsided footpaths, climbing steep hills that would startle me with sudden glimpses of city skyline, harbour blue, the cartoonish curve of the bridge. There are beautifully maintained children’s playgrounds, lost toys propped on letterboxes by friendly passers-by, happy people walking dogs or babies. The architecture is a curious collation of styles: terraces, bungalows, blond-brick apartment buildings crammed with families here for the school districts. Twigs fall, sticks fall, a mess of seeds and berries, golden orb spiders strung on webs, kookaburras laughing, magpies murmuring; the astonishing bright white wings of a sulphur-crested cockatoo on a stormy day, the clamour of chatter from rainbow lorikeets at dusk, possums crossing wires in the moonlight.

  Even my father makes fun of me for living here, and old school friends joke: ‘It’s so nice over here, everyone’s so pretty! And they’re all exactly the same.’ There’s diversity here, but it’s concealed behind uniforms. There are broken people here, but they’re pinned together with therapy, Botox, hair dye and designer clothes, rage pegged down with hot stone massage, soothed by high-functioning alcoholism.

  Across the Harbour Bridge, beyond the tourist district and the central business district, the diversity, especially in the inner west, is flamboyant and proud. There is wealth there too, but it’s cooler, hipper, more working class somehow. The broken people there are scarred and pockmarked with dirty teeth, their cracks open, deep fissures showing, their dependencies visceral. They’ll shout at you from parks littered with broken bottles and graffiti, or they’ll sell you crystals.

  All this is to say that, although the drive from Neutral Bay to Newtown in the inner west was only twenty minutes, it was like crossing to a different dimension.

  Here I am, I thought—as I always think when I walk the streets of Newtown, elation rushing at me, along with the sensory cacophony of crowds, pubs, restaurants, second-hand bookshops, traffic jams, horns, buskers, the anger open, the loss visceral. Here I am, at last, in the world.

  I found Wilbur’s building and there he was in the lobby, the shape of him uncertain through the frosted glass.

  2.

  The guy with the hipster beard was here.

  I remembered his beard, and the fact that he had come out at his nineteenth birthday dinner, but not his name. For this, I blamed the man himself. He’d worn a flat cap each day of the retreat, but not tonight. Just brown hair and beard tonight. If he’d been wearing the cap, I was sure I’d know his name.

  We were in Wilbur’s apartment. Wilbur himself had disappeared down the hall into a room that sounded like a kitchen. That left four of us standing in his living room: Guy without his flat cap; Frangipani, whose real name I had also forgotten but then it sashayed back to me (Sasha); disgruntled man with problem shoulder (Pete?); and me.

  I was not surprised to see Flat-cap. He seemed like one of those affable types who hadn’t yet found his gang of pals. So he floats around, taking social opportunities, just in case, you never know, life is for living. Nor was I surprised to see Frangipani: her investment in The Guidebook was substantial.

  Disgruntled man, however, was so astonishing, such a wild card, that all of us were surreptitiously staring at him. On the last day at the retreat, he had shouted his way out of the room and slammed the door—yet here he was!

  Wilbur’s apartment was on the top floor of a three-storey block in a Newtown side street. Dark red brick, narrow corridors, blistering paint, graffiti on the fire extinguisher. The staircase and the corridors had been low and claustrophobic as we’d filed behind Wilbur, after meeting him in the lobby, and then Wilbur opened the door of his apartment and shazam!

  ‘Shazam’ might be extreme. I just mean that the front door opened direct onto his living room and it was bright! One wall was lined with windows. These were old, framed, rectangular windows, each splitting the summer-evening sky into six squares.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Wilbur had said, and he’d disappeared down the hall. So we’d formed our ragged circle in the living room, and looked around us.

  First, your eyes were drawn to the bank of windows, and then to the rich dark wood of the floorboards. These were battered, with wide cracks between: I saw pins, staples, coins and dirt in the cracks.

  Next, you realised that the room appeared to have been recently, haphazardly decorated, as if by a teacher who has rushed to display the children’s arts and crafts in time for Open Day.

  For example: miniature hot-air balloons dangled from the ceiling. A fan spun slowly so that the balloons tipped and swayed. You could imagine their occupants shrieking in alarm, the balloon pilots sweating and grabbing at ropes.

  Origami butterflies and birds perched on the TV, coffee table, bookshelf and even on a stack of CDs. (I studied the CD titles: some I didn’t know, some I liked. He had Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, which is one of my mother’s favourites.)

  The wall opposite the windows was crowded with posters, many askew or slipping, of hang-gliders, dragons, antique planes, griffins and dancers caught mid-leap.

  ‘I sense a theme here,’ Flat-cap announced.

  ‘What?’ said Frangipani, uneasy. ‘What theme?’

  We waited as she gazed around at balloons, butterflies, birds, the pictures of aeroplanes and people in mid-air.

  ‘What?’ she repeated, almost scolding.

  ‘Flight,’ Flat-cap told her gently. ‘Everything here is in flight.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Sceptical.

  We were all deliberately quiet then, careful not to catch each other’s eyes.

  Wilbur returned from his kitchen with a huge platter of sushi. His arms were stretched wide to carry it, and he kept ducking to avoid hot-air balloons, now and then hitting one and swearing in a quiet, friendly manner. ‘I should have asked people to RSVP,’ he said, ‘instead of leaving it open like this. Didn’t know how much sushi to make.’

  ‘I don’t eat sushi,’ Frangipani declared.

  If we were still on the retreat, I reflected, she’d never have said that. She’d have been a giant sushi fan.

  Wilbur said, ‘That’s okay!’ as if he forgave her for not eating sushi. His identity had also changed. It’s funny when you meet someone and you think, This is what he is like, and then you see him smiling in his own apartment, in his own favourite, loose and comfortable clothes, in his own bare feet, and you think: Ah. No. Here he is.

  He was wearing a t-shirt with a faded, soft look and old jeans, and his feet were bare, as I just now hinted, and his hair was shorter than it had been, and he seemed perfectly happy with his height.

  He set the platter on a low coffee table before dragging this into the middle of the room.

  Next, Wilbur pushed and shoved armchairs and kitchen chairs until they formed a ring around the coffee table.

  While all this happened, the four of us stepped back and forth, getting out of his way, silent, not offering to help. We were all reserving judgment.

  Wilbur didn’t seem to mind. He stopped, wiped his forehead, and counted us. Then he counted the seats he’d set out. There were enough.

  ‘Would everybody like to sit?’

  We were still in our circle, slightly displaced. Nobody moved. Wilbur twanged an elastic band around his wrist. Lines crossed his forehead. I was reminded suddenly of the moment I first met him, tall guy smiling, ‘Snow!’

  His face cleared now, just as it had then.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m extremely grateful to you all for coming tonight. Like I told you in the letter, my parents wrote The Guidebook. They left me instructions to invite you on the retreat, and then to teach this course. If you decide to keep coming each Tuesday, I’ll follow their outline—maybe it will even be fun.’ He hesitated. ‘I hope it will be fun, but not in the sense of making fun of my parents. Do you see what I mean?’

  Flat-cap nodded. ‘You don’t want pure irony,’ he suggested.

  ‘Right. Exactly.’ Wilbur seemed relieved. ‘I could run this course with a smirk. We could roll our eyes at each other. We could
be consciously meta. We could analyse my parents step by step, and pity them. But I think we have to play it straight. It’s a game, sure, but can we all agree to step inside the game?’

  There was a strange pause then, the moment poised. Frangipani cleared her throat as if to speak, then changed her mind. Outside, someone in a car hit the horn hard and long. The blaring faded, started again, then merged with the sound of an aeroplane passing overhead.

  Flat-cap grinned. ‘You arranged the aeroplane?’ He pointed up.

  This made us laugh again, only in a quiet and thoughtful way. I was thinking about Wilbur’s question. This charade: was it safe, was it a lie?

  Unexpectedly, disgruntled guy spoke up. So far he’d been silent except for grunts and a low-level scowl, eyes darting about.

  ‘I’ll say something here,’ he said, intensifying the scowl. ‘Pete Aldridge, as you might recall. Pest control. I won’t beat around the bush. I came tonight because I don’t trust you, Wilbur. No offence—’ he stopped and glowered at Wilbur, who nodded graciously ‘—no offence to you, I say, but I believe this to be a scam. Quite possibly you want to start a cult, Wilbur, and you want to take these good people for everything they’ve got and then have them jump off a cliff.’ He ran his gaze around the circle. ‘What they do with their money is their concern, I suppose. However, I will not have them jumping off a cliff to their death. To their respective deaths. Therefore, Wilbur, I will play your game. I will play it just as you ask. But so help me, the game is done the moment I think you’ve gone too far. And do you know what I’ll do then?’

  ‘What?’ Wilbur asked.

  ‘I will snap you over my knee. Is that a deal?’