Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  Uncle Bob responded: ‘Yes, right, of course. That makes sense. And that summer I went up there and retiled his bathroom means nothing, does it?’

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night I would wake and think: But I do deserve it. I did lose my brother. I do.

  Nothing happened in the end, but Uncle Bob took me aside one day and said in this half-smiling, half-serious tone: ‘Half of that money belongs to your brother, I suppose. So you’ll put that aside for his return?’

  Which I think was meant as pure malice.

  I gave the money to a financial adviser and forgot about it.

  I got a job at a big Sydney law firm, in litigation. This was the 1990s. The main thing happening then was that we were en route to the year 2000.

  That’s what we were up to in the 1990s: tipping slowly, steadily, wide-eyed, terrified, elated towards that big, heady, ugly year 2000.

  5.

  There were two important things about the approaching year 2000: first, the pressure that the artist formerly known as Prince had placed on us by defining the ultimate party as that which takes place on the last day of 1999; and second, the fact that the world was going to be wiped out by the millennium bug (presumably while throwing Prince’s party).

  I am honoured to say that I was a member of my law firm’s Y2K Action Response Group. This meant that I was on the firm’s email list for Y2K updates, and received weekly reports about such things as the six thousand firefighters who would stand guard over the first few uncertain moments of 2000 in riot gear, and the air traffic controllers who used paper and pen to monitor all flights in England and Wales while a computer was being upgraded to overcome Y2K compliance problems.

  I spent a lot of time writing letters of advice on the Year 2000 Information Disclosure Act. If I remember correctly, this legislation protected you if you told people you were prepared for Y2K but then it turned out you were wrong. A lot of countries had this kind of law. It was known as Good Samaritan legislation. As if reassuring your customers that your system wouldn’t crash when the calendar changed was exactly the same as crossing the street to help somebody who has been beaten up, robbed, stripped and left half-dead on the street, bandaging his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and hefting him up onto your donkey.

  6.

  It was 1999, and I was sharing a flat in Balmain with a pair of strangers, a self-contained couple who were always at the theatre. I was taking the ferry to work in the city each day, arriving home late at night. The Guidebook kept right on turning up, because I kept right on sending in change-of-address notifications. Sometimes I threw it away without opening it, but one night I opened it.

  Chapter 72

  Is there happiness in truth or only beauty?

  Keats is the one to ask, I suppose.

  But I think—in my view—there is some chink or gleam of happiness in truth. The radiance of understanding?

  And when truth becomes clear, it comes shining through. Like the window you think is clean, but it’s not, and then you wash it and everything outside jumps forward, jumps through, jumps gleefully right at your face.

  One of my flatmates was a draftsman or a town planner—I don’t know; I never really concentrated when he spoke, as he was indescribably boring—and he had this stack of rolled papers on the dining room table. I remember reading the chapter about truth jumping forward at your face, looking up, and seeing the rolled papers, the o’s in the centre of each roll, little round mouths, gaping black mysteries, o’s of anguish, silent wails for help.

  part

  7

  REFLECTIONS ON 2000

  By Abigail Sorensen

  In February this year, I had lunch with an old friend, Carly Grimshaw.

  Carly and I grew up as neighbours and best friends. But I had not been in contact with her for several years. We had ‘drifted apart’. No animosity.

  Her email arrived in my inbox at work. My heart smiled at her name. She must have searched for me online, located me on my law firm’s website. She introduced herself as a ‘blast from the past!’, congratulated me on having ‘become a lawyer!!!!’, reminded me that she and I had planned to grow up and become ‘rock stars!!!’. Next, she informed me that she was now in retail, working at Country Road in the QVB, and that we should ‘defo’ meet for lunch at the café in the GPO building in Martin Place, ‘as that’s about a halfway point!!’.

  The ‘defo’ confused me for a moment, since we refer to defamation law as ‘defo’ in my firm.

  *

  The lunch with Carly did not contain as many exclamation marks as Carly’s email, but there were a few.

  We exclaimed at how happy we were to see each other. She exclaimed at my new hairstyle. I exclaimed at hers. (She used to wear it in a single braid over her shoulder, now it’s a pixie cut.) We exclaimed about how long it had been.

  Then we settled into sentences ending in question marks or full stops. Essentially, an exchange of information about our families. How’s your mum? How’s your mum? How’s your dad? How’s your dad? I asked after her brother Andrew and her sister Rabbit.

  ‘Rabbit!’ She smirked, as if I’d used the wrong fork. ‘I forgot we called her that!’

  Surely not. Rabbit had been Rabbit for years.

  But no, now she was Erin, apparently, in year five and winning tennis comps. I almost said, ‘Year five! I can’t believe little Rabbit’s in year five!’ but felt weary, suddenly. Also, it made sense that Erin would be in year five. Time passes. People grow.

  Andrew had studied Japanese at university, Carly said, and spent a year living in Kyoto.

  ‘Seriously?’

  She nodded, serious, to match my seriously?, then her face lit up, and she told me an amusing story about how Andrew had missed his flight to Japan because he couldn’t find his passport. He’d had to get an urgent passport replacement and fly a few days later.

  I laughed. We both laughed. ‘It was hilarious!’ Carly said. ‘He’s standing at his open drawer going, I know it was in here! and we’re all going, When did you last see it? and he’s like, It’s just, it’s always there! and it turns out he hadn’t checked! He couldn’t actually remember seeing it since we’d been to Tahiti! And we were all going, Andrew! Tahiti was years ago! Because it was—you remember when my family went to Tahiti? And it rained the whole time? His passport had probably expired! And the taxi’s waiting outside to take him to the airport!’

  ‘Oh, that’s so funny!’ I said.

  But it wasn’t that funny.

  I tried to think of something else to say about it. ‘Typical Andrew,’ I tried, although, in the time I knew him, I had never been particularly conscious of his absent-mindedness pertaining to identification documents.

  ‘Just hysterical,’ Carly said.

  At this point, I had run out of things to ask.

  I wanted to enquire whether Andrew’s skin had cleared up, but that seemed inappropriate. Flute! I remembered Carly played flute. ‘How’s the flute going?’

  ‘Oh, the flute!’ She frowned. ‘I haven’t played for years. Forgot I played that.’

  Her braid, Rabbit, her flute: these were essential elements of Carly.

  ‘Who are you?’ I considered asking next, but I suspected she would be defensive rather than amused.

  There was a silence and Carly ate her focaccia with roasted vegetables. A piece of chargrilled eggplant spilled onto her plate and she looked at this with intensity.

  I began to feel uncomfortable. It was too much intensity for a single piece of eggplant. Several pieces maybe, or the entire range of roasted vegetable, but this was just one.

  She’s going to say something about Robert, I thought suddenly. She’s going to say something wise and philosophical, or tragic, or hopeful, or sympathetic.

  I honestly couldn’t stand it. Don’t, Carly, don’t mention Robert’s name.

  Despite my silent pleas, she spoke Robert’s name, but what she said was completely unexpected.

  *

 
She said that she’d been having a secret relationship with Robert right before he disappeared.

  A relationship.

  That was the word that she used.

  ‘A relationship?’

  She clarified. She and Robert had been going out for two weeks.

  ‘That’s not a relationship.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Going out?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, not going out out. I just mean we were together. But we were keeping it secret. Until we were sure.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘He would sneak into my place late at night,’ she said. ‘And then sneak back to your house in the early morning.’

  ‘This was happening right before he disappeared?’

  Carly nodded. Her face was now grim. Her expression made me laugh.

  ‘It’s just—it’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’d have told the police about that. You’d have told me!’

  ‘It is true.’ Now she smiled tragically. ‘I didn’t tell the police because Robert and I had agreed to keep our relationship secret. And I thought he would come back.’

  ‘But he didn’t come back,’ I said. ‘So then you could have told. At some point, you must have known that it was time to tell!’ I was still half laughing in disbelief.

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe now’s the right time.’

  I gave her a look.

  ‘It’s just, I kept expecting him back,’ she said. ‘Remember how we used to spend hours figuring out where he was? I believed that. And time kept going by. And I started to think I should say something, but it was, like, why now? It would have sounded so weird! Like, oh, by the way, there’s this. It might have seemed like I was lying.’

  She was lying right now, I was sure of it. Or she had fabricated memories based on a teenage crush.

  ‘So when did you last see him?’ I asked, playing along to test her.

  ‘The Tuesday night, three days before your birthday,’ she replied promptly.

  ‘You did not.’

  ‘I did.’

  She used her fork to eat the fallen eggplant. This struck me as odd.

  ‘Are you saying you were the last person to talk to him?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And you still didn’t think it was relevant to tell the police? Or at least me?’

  She shrugged again. ‘It wasn’t like it changed anything. He was gone! He was gone whether I told you or not. It’s not like he’d told me where he was going! I had no relevant information.’

  ‘But, Carly,’ I said, ‘he disappeared three days before my birthday, remember? I mean, I thought he was at Clarissa’s, and my parents thought he was at Bing’s. But he wasn’t at either place. Don’t tell me he was at your house. You didn’t hide him under your four-poster bed for three days!’

  ‘I did have that four-poster bed, didn’t I?’ Carly smiled nostalgically.

  ‘Oh, do not tell me you’ve forgotten that, too!’

  ‘He told me he was at Bing’s. He knocked on my bedroom window about midnight, talked about how piano practice was going, and how he had to sleep on a really thin mattress on the floor of Bing’s room, and how Bing had a Yoda night-light. I told him I wasn’t sure about us—about our relationship. He left at about three in the morning. He said he was going back to Bing’s.’

  ‘You broke up with him?’

  ‘No. I told him that I wasn’t sure. I said I needed time.’

  ‘And he climbed back out of your bedroom window and told you he was going to Bing’s?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘I know that. Don’t you think I know that?’ She sounded wounded.

  *

  I returned to the office after lunch and found a memo in my in-tray from a senior partner.

  Dear Abigail,

  A client has raised an interesting issue with me today. What if he wanted to publish an article on a website, and include a hyperlink to a different website? Would he be liable for anything defamatory contained in that other site?

  Could you give me your thoughts?

  Regards,

  Stuart Reevesby

  PS Cliff’s instincts are clearly right: the internet is going to create a minefield of legal problems before we can figure them all out.

  There was no client name or file number on the memo. Non-chargeable work.

  Ordinarily, this would have made me angry. I’d have been annoyed by Stuart’s informal tone, particularly his use of a postscript, and the content of the postscript itself.

  Everyone was talking about the net as a legal minefield: why give Cliff’s ‘instincts’ the credit? Cliff Maybridge, another partner, had used the line in a meeting the previous week.

  But that day I was elated by the memo.

  Yes, I thought. Yes.

  Can you hyperlink to a defamatory article? Can you contain someone else’s defamation within your own frame? I began to research.

  *

  I do not mean to suggest that I forgot all about Carly’s revelations and buried myself in work.

  I called Matilda, our caseworker, and shared Carly’s story, noting my reservations.

  Matilda took it more seriously than me. She interviewed everyone again—with a focus on Carly, obviously.

  My mother, who had started working now (part-time: her real job was finding Robert, keeping his name in the public eye, following every lead), took leave and flew down from Maroochydore to meet Carly for coffee. Apparently they both cried.

  I met with Carly a few more times myself. Each time, Carly cried.

  I still thought she was making it up.

  In the end, all we really had was another reason for Robert to have run away, or to have taken his own life: a broken heart.

  ‘I just said I needed time,’ Carly insisted, crying again. ‘I didn’t break his heart.’

  Nobody saw that distinction as relevant.

  ‘I didn’t even want to break it off,’ she added, small child’s voice. ‘I was trying to keep his interest.’

  ‘But now we know exactly the moment he disappeared!’ my mother said. ‘He was heading from the Grimshaws’ place to Bing’s, and he never got there!’

  She seemed to find this exciting, as if we could go to that place now, reach through time and pull him back.

  *

  Also this year, The Guidebook has, as usual, offered sporadic advice, asked strange questions, and instructed me to undertake extracurricular activities. These activities have included, but have not been limited to, ballroom dancing, deep-sea diving and parasailing.

  Generally, I disobeyed.

  One or two chapters surprised me as reasonably pleasing. For example:

  Chapter 13

  You think that a helicopter does not have wings? You are wrong.

  The helicopter’s blade is a wing. A rotary wing. Wings come in all shapes and sizes, you see. The helicopter’s wing just happens to go around.

  (Of course, if the blade falls off a helicopter, it immediately takes on the aerodynamic configuration of an express train.)

  Listen: you have wings yourself. You just don’t recognise them yet.

  *

  In March, I did sign up for a class in Italian cooking, as instructed.

  Thursdays at 7 pm, Leichhardt.

  I was held up in a meeting with a barrister, and arrived at the first class an hour late to find the other students seated around a table, about to eat the food they had prepared.

  The teacher kindly ‘borrowed’ a little from everybody’s plate. ‘I’ll just borrow some of this chicken here? I’ll just borrow a twist of spaghetti?’

  ‘No, no,’ I kept saying, ‘please don’t,’ but she continued borrowing. The faces around the table were blank. ‘They’ll be mad at me for stealing their food!’ I said. Most faces remained blank, which confirmed my hypothesis. A few smiled wanly. All but two were women: the men included a chatty guy who growled when the teacher tried to steal his food, and another guy who laughed at
this.

  I missed the second and third lessons because I was working eighteen-hour days preparing for a hearing. (The case settled just outside the courtroom, minutes before it was called.) I missed the fourth because I was exhausted. I was determined to go to the fifth. However, my mother, who was visiting me at the time, called to tell me she had hurt her ankle climbing onto my kitchen bench to reach the flour. ‘I feel very strange and faint,’ she said. ‘I can’t think why I wanted the flour now, except I had in mind making gingerbread men.’

  I took her to the hospital to get the ankle X-rayed. It wasn’t broken, only sprained. She apologised. ‘Now you’ve missed your cooking course! And my ankle wasn’t even broken!’ She glared at her ankle.

  ‘It’s good it isn’t broken.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, unconvinced.

  After that, only two lessons remained, and there seemed no point in going. Nobody would recognise me. Or if they did, they would guard their food.

  *

  In April this year, I received the following chapter from The Guidebook in the mail:

  Chapter 16

  Consider your peripheral vision. Always be looking for things out of the corner of your eye.

  This was amusing because I’m already looking. I look for my brother through windows, at bus shelters, down corridors. I’m always turning my head quickly, catching at shadows and reflections, reaching for glimpses, cupping my hands around corners.

  *

  In May this year, I attended a party in Glebe.

  It was my friend Natalia’s twenty-sixth birthday.

  She was a programmer now, renting a large house in Glebe, which she shared with her sister, two cats and a fish.

  I arrived with a bottle of pinot in a brown paper bag. Natalia embraced me. We looked at the pinot and pretended to admire it, imitating the teacher from our wine appreciation course. In fact, it was a very good wine with heady notes of summer fruits, but I played the same ironic, mocking games we’d played back in our university days.