Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  ‘One, two, three, four, let’s have a thumb war,’ Leesa chanted. ‘Now we have to bow our thumbs to each other. Like this. See?’

  Approaching my café, I thought: So great to have a hairdresser next door! So handy!

  Inside the door, I paused to appreciate the marvel of my café. I started this café, I designed this café, I chose the furniture, I composed the menu, I employed these people!

  Xuang helped, of course.

  When I returned from Montreal, pregnant and broken, and announced my Happiness Café plan to my parents, they laughed gently, clicked their teeth, said, ‘Maybe one day,’ and, ‘What a lovely dream.’ Then they asked if I’d confirmed my start date with my old law firm yet and how much maternity leave I would take.

  But Xuang squeezed his eyes tightly shut, flung them open and shouted, ‘Yes! I love it! Let’s do it!’ My parents were pretty annoyed with him.

  He’s an enthusiast, Xuang, who always has a scheme, an investment, a real-estate deal, an enterprise in hand, and he has opened several restaurants. Most of what he does is successful: he’s shrewd, relentless and now very wealthy. He has told me, quite seriously, that he thinks he might be mildly bipolar, and he does get into very low moods. But when he’s upbeat, he’s intoxicating. He told me my Happiness Café was ingenious, that it would go global. I planned to use the inheritance I’d got from my grandfather for start-up costs, but Xuang insisted on bankrolling my first few years, and covering Oscar’s day care.

  I was unlikely to make any real profit for a year or two, he explained, and he advised me on payroll software, and helped me search out a location. It’s because of Xuang that I live on the Lower North Shore now, that there is plenty of storage space in the back room of the café, that our espresso machine is the best available.

  But I applied for council permissions! I did online courses in the Food Service Industry, Retail Management and Café Ownership! I consulted with psychologists on happy colour schemes! And so on.

  Now I felt faint with joy at my achievements.

  Every table was full!

  My café is a hit! A success! (More or less. It does pretty well, anyway, and Xuang hardly ever has to subsidise now.)

  It’s always full at the breakfast hour. Three people waited for takeaway coffees at the counter. None was drumming fingers on the counter impatiently or frowning at their phone. None was holding out a leg to trip up other customers.

  Many cafés offer stacks of colouring books and crayons for children. At mine, we have boxes of CRAFTS FOR EVERYONE: HELP YOURSELF! The boxes contain stickers, pencils and complex colouring-in sheets of a superior quality, because playing makes adults happy too, creativity stimulates endorphins. It only ever seems to be the children who play with these boxes of crafts, however, which makes me feel resentful in the same way that I resent it when I get a box of Paddle Pops for the kids and Mini Magnums for the adults, and the kids all demand a Mini Magnum, please.

  Today, however, three young men in their twenties leaned forward, shading and colouring, sticking and gluing.

  My heart leaped at this, without me asking it to.

  All day long, conversations made me smile.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ a guy in a suit asked his companion.

  ‘I’ve been well,’ the companion replied, then reconsidered. ‘Never better!’

  At another table, a woman confided in her friend. ‘It’s a cake that looks like a boot,’ she said. ‘But I want it in different colours.’

  Her friend nodded thoughtfully. ‘Like a boot?’

  Later, a couple sat and planned their wedding with a celebrant. A different couple had once sat at that very table sorting out their divorce. You see, there is always balance. After the dark, there is light.

  ‘Sometimes people like a poem read,’ the celebrant informed the young couple.

  ‘And you will read this poem?’ the young man enquired, uncertain in his English.

  ‘I will if you want me to, or you can have a friend.’

  The celebrant told the young couple: ‘I’ve had weddings with the string quartet, the butterflies, the flowers in an arch, everything! And weddings where they’ve just had a handful of people sort of gathered—’ she cupped her hands together, gathering the guests ‘—in a spot.’

  The couple nodded, pleased. ‘We will actually be facing the view,’ the young girl said.

  ‘So the guests have their backs to the view?’ the celebrant confirmed, making a note.

  *

  When I collected Oscar from day care, I read the daily report.

  The children lay on the floor with their eyes closed today, it said, and thought about colours. The children looked at mirrors to see what they looked like on the outside. Then they looked at kaleidoscopes to see what they looked like on the inside.

  That startled me. I thought: Is there something . . . is there some scientific truth here that has passed me by? Is this, after all, what a kaleidoscope is? A vision of one’s own internal organs? Or, more metaphysically, a vision of one’s soul?

  On the drive home, I asked Oscar what he had thought when he looked at himself through the kaleidoscope. He didn’t appear to know what I was talking about.

  ‘Why is it dark?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Because it’s late.’

  ‘Why is it late?’

  ‘Well—’ But before I could answer he’d asked his next question.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Robert?’ He asks this now and then, although the answer is always the same.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ I said. ‘He’s lost. He’s not coming back.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Why is the moon there?’ Pointing through the window.

  I used to hear people complaining about the questions children asked, all their whys. And I thought: So easy! Just answer! What’s the issue, you strange, complaining parents?

  That’s what I thought.

  Now I want to claw out my eyes sometimes, at the questions, the days and days of questions. Life is a constant pop quiz, and I’m always failing. The cognitive dissonance, the limits of my knowledge, the exposure of those limits when the four-year-old demands answers in a lift, say, a quiet, crowded lift, everyone waiting, with interest, for my reply. To be left with I don’t know, to slip listlessly into I’m not sure.

  I don’t know why the sandblaster can knock Spiderman off the wall!

  And definitions! ‘What does serious mean?’ he asks.

  ‘Not funny,’ I say, but you can’t define words by their negative. ‘Serious, it’s just, you know, serious.’ Or I define it with words that themselves require definition. ‘Solemn, grave, earnest . . . you know, serious.’

  Once, he was walking down the stairs and he said, ‘Nobody is ugly except you.’

  ‘Oscar!’ I said, reeling. ‘Really?’

  And he looked concerned, uncertain, and asked, ‘What does except mean?’

  Try defining except to a four-year-old.

  ‘Why can ghosts go through walls?’ he asked once.

  ‘Because they have no material substance,’ I said. ‘They’re mysterious, misty, intangible, without form.’

  He giggled. ‘Why is there no such thing as monsters?’

  17.

  At ‘Flight: A Practical Approach’ we learned the best positions for flying and how to avoid cricks in the neck and cramps. We stood in a row, our heads tucked down, our arms outstretched, and Wilbur studied us in turn, consulting a chart, adjusting our positions ever so slightly with his large, firm hands, moving up and down the line.

  Nobody laughed. We were deep in the game.

  Afterwards, we stood on a street corner and now we did laugh, but softly, almost mystically.

  ‘I mean, why are we doing this?’ Nicole asked.

  Pete Aldridge was unusually cheerful. ‘Ah, well.’ He shrugged.

  Everyone dispersed, waving and smiling, towards their cars, but Niall and I stood on the corner.
/>   Choose happiness! I thought. Keep it simple!

  This man standing beside me had sought me out at my café. He had suggested coffee. Looking sideways at a tree he had informed me that the reason he was doing this course was that he hoped I might be doing it too.

  In response, I had sent a message to the universe requesting that it please arrange for Niall to ask me out.

  ‘Hey,’ I said now on the street corner, ‘can I have your number? You want to get a drink some time?’

  part

  6

  1.

  While I was studying at university, and still living at home—it was a seven-minute train ride from our place in Stanmore to Redfern, followed by an easy walk to campus—my parents separated.

  They’d stopped fighting about parenting techniques by then: now it was more a hideous, intransigent dichotomy. That is to say: Dad claimed that Robert must be dead; Mum said he was alive and coming back. She baked Robert a cake each year on his birthday, in preparation. She still took trips, visiting police stations all over the country, distributing posters and pamphlets. She still met with our caseworker, Matilda, for regular updates and to devise action plans.

  Obviously those two positions were inherently incompatible.

  I hated both my parents, and both their positions, but especially Dad’s. I could hardly look at him. I glowered at him when I did.

  The day that my dad moved out, I ignored him. He was going in and out with boxes and suitcases, pushing them along the hall floor, and I was walking past him to the kitchen to get myself a snack.

  ‘I hate that smile of yours,’ he said suddenly.

  I didn’t even know that I was smiling. I had thought my face was blank.

  But he stopped and said, ‘That weird half-smile you do. It’s so vindictive. It’s so insouciant.’

  ‘Which?’ I said. ‘Which is it?’

  He started shoving the big box down the hall again, using his knees, and I shouted, ‘Because those two words mean opposite things!’ But he didn’t answer.

  I visited him at his new flat a week later and we didn’t mention that conversation, or the fact that they’re not really antonyms, vindictive and insouciant; I guess you could be both at the same time.

  2.

  Mum tried to buy out my dad so we could stay in the house, but she couldn’t get a bank to lend her enough money, even though she told various mortgage brokers, bank managers, people in the post office and her hairdresser that we had to stay there for when Robert came back. The banks didn’t seem to find this relevant. (The hairdresser did.)

  There were more, bigger fights then, because Mum couldn’t believe that Dad would insist on selling and Dad laughed an awful, scornful laugh, or else roared that she was being ridiculous and Robert was never coming back, get it into your head.

  Mum and I moved to a rental place in Petersham, which had issues with mould. She asked the people who bought our house to pass on our address to Robert if he ever turned up. She left them a stack of laminated cards containing our new address.

  Meanwhile, chapters of The Guidebook kept arriving because I filled in their change-of-address form.

  The first to arrive at our new place was disconcertingly apt.

  Chapter 99

  If you are a pilot, you cannot fly in cloud unless you have an instrument rating.

  Flying in cloud is an illusion. You can feel the plane turning right, you can see the plane turning right—you can see the movement of the wing! But you are not turning right. The instruments tell you that the plane is going straight ahead.

  You have to believe the technology despite what your senses tell you.

  Once you’ve lost your horizon in cloud you have only 30 to 40 seconds before you become completely disorientated.

  Once, The Guidebook told me to swim a thousand laps. Another chapter instructed me to climb walls. They said that I should breathe in, and then out. (That was an easy one.) They informed me I should pretend I was a certain animal: a flying fox, a butterfly, a frog, many others.

  Chapter 144

  Visualise yourself as a bush turkey. Get into character as a bush turkey! Impersonate a bush turkey! Strut about, darting this way and that, peck at an insect on the side of the road, get into a flap!

  Study these diagrams of a cat posing and stretching. Try them out regularly!

  I did not pretend I was a bush turkey. Or maybe just the once, alone.

  Sometimes, as I fell asleep at night, I imagined myself to be a dolphin or a dragonfly. This was soothing. A cure for insomnia.

  The cat stretches were good: like free yoga classes.

  Chapter 52

  Seek out the following objects and inhale each deeply: vanilla, coconut, cinnamon, nutmeg, frangipani, freesia, roses, mint, glue, tar. Next, sign up for a wine appreciation class.

  I did not set out to locate the fragrant items but I did take a whiff if I happened on one. Not the glue or tar. I’m pretty sure sniffing them is dangerous.

  I signed up for a wine appreciation course. But that was only because I saw a notice for one, and a cute boy stood beside me reading the notice too. He reached up and tore off one of the number strips, so I tore off one for myself.

  When I got to the course, the cute boy wasn’t there. Why had he wasted one of the number strips?! But I made friends with a girl named Natalia who was studying Electrical Engineering and skateboarded everywhere. It’s easy to make friends when you’re both throwing back one glass of wine after another. We paid no attention to talk of how to swirl the wine, or to hints of sesame or strawberry, we just chatted and drank.

  3.

  I finished my arts degree with first-class honours in English, finished my law degree, went to the College of Law.

  What I remember about getting my arts degree was Natalia. We often met for lunch, either at the Holme Building or at Manning Bar, and one day I said, ‘Where should we go today?’

  ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I myself am Holme-ward bound, far from the Manning crowd.’

  That took my breath away, it was so clever. I loved Natalia after that. We lost contact for a while when I went to law school, but reconnected later and, now that I think about it, maybe all students at Sydney University say that clever Holme-ward thing?

  Also, I had a boyfriend. Carl. He was kind of mean. ‘You are unbelievably stupid,’ he’d say, smiling like he was sharing a joke with me, when I did something like parked over somebody’s driveway by accident, or got lost on the way to a party.

  I told him about my missing brother on our second date. He seemed fascinated, as if this was a puzzle I’d been unable to solve, but he was pretty sure he’d solve it for me. He asked a lot of questions. When I told about the MS diagnosis, I could almost see him drop the puzzle onto the table, his expression suggesting we’d just squandered his valuable time. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘So he’d be dead anyway by now.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no. MS isn’t usually fatal.’

  ‘Well, but,’ he said, shrugging, and he changed the subject.

  *

  Around the time I started law school, my grandfather had a stroke, and Mum moved up to Maroochydore to be close to him. She carried on her work of tracing Robert from there.

  What I remember about law school is that some guy had been framed by the police, apparently, and everyone wanted to get him out of prison. It seemed to me they should get a lawyer, rather than pinning up posters. This was before I became a lawyer, remember, so I believed that the legal system worked.

  Graffiti on the inside of the law school toilet doors said: Do something shocking. Vote blue stocking.

  Okay! I thought obligingly, every time I saw this. But I have no particular memory of voting anything.

  I had a boyfriend named Lachlan at law school. He was fine. He used to tickle me a lot though, which makes me squirm now, thinking of it. It was his version of foreplay.

  Also, he liked to read imaginary survival guides. They made him laugh out loud. How to Survi
ve an Alien Invasion. A Guide to Life on the Planet of the Apes. He gave these to me as gifts and said, ‘Trust me, this is hilarious,’ and I would flick through them and no; no, they were not.

  The College of Law was fun. You do six months of practical legal training there, which means you play-act being a lawyer, and then you get admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and you can be a lawyer.

  4.

  My grandfather died, and he left me thirty thousand dollars. I’d only ever visited a few times, when I was a kid. I hadn’t paid much attention to him on those visits, being busy on the beach. So, at first, this seemed like a bargain: inheritance without grief.

  But the rest of the estate wasn’t worth much—even when they sold his black opal—and my mum and her sister, Auntie Gem, ended up with twenty thousand dollars each. None of my cousins got a cent.

  I think Grandpa must have meant my thirty thousand as a kind of consolation prize because I’d lost my brother, whereas the other cousins still had their siblings. But it was more trouble than it was worth: the cousins made brash jokes about how I was the rich cousin now and I’d better throw a massive party and invite them, and buy them trips to Europe and jewellery and pay off all their student debts. Actually, these were confusing jokes because sometimes they seemed deadly serious. And with a really inflated idea of how much thirty thousand dollars buys you. But I laughed anyway.

  They also made jokes about how I was the favourite granddaughter, and what did I do to make Grandpa love me best? No, seriously, what?

  Meanwhile, Auntie Gem smiled politely, but in her slightly squishy way, while her husband, my uncle Bob, became heated and wanted to challenge the inheritance in court. I read back over my notes on succession and prepared arguments, but felt mortified, and thought I would probably just hand over the money. Certainly, if anybody deserved the money, my mother did, since she’d moved up to Queensland to be with her father when he had the stroke. This added another layer of tension, because she reminded her brother-in-law Bob of this one day, adding that she was happy for me to get it so that should be an end to it. My mother had fallen in love with Xuang by now, and was sunny.