Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  Other than Natalia, I knew nobody at the party, but she introduced me to a small group standing in a circle by the fridge.

  I tried to join their conversation. They were discussing recycling. I did not find this particularly entertaining, but I joined in anyway. They welcomed me.

  I drank several glasses of wine. Natalia found me again and introduced me to her sister, Tia, who was like an elongated replica of Natalia—the kind of sibling resemblance that is almost humorous: genetics on display. The three of us had a good conversation about the Human Genome Project, law, life, Java, time, TV and drank more. A young man walked by.

  I stared at him.

  I knew him.

  I was drunk now, so I carried on staring, although I was not so drunk that I didn’t know this was impolite.

  The young man stopped. He had thick eyebrows and dark eyes. A watch on his wrist. Forearms thick with dark hair. A beer in his hand.

  He stared back at me.

  ‘I know you,’ he said.

  ‘I know you too. That’s why I’m staring.’

  We were both silent, studying each other.

  ‘But why?’ I said. ‘Why do I know you?’

  He nodded. ‘Why?’

  Natalia and her sister were excited by the puzzle. They quizzed us both. We shared our occupations, our educational history, employment history, favourite holiday destinations. None of these matched. Between questions, we stared. Now and then we laughed. Then we grew serious again. It was suspenseful.

  ‘You’re like someone I saw once on TV or something,’ I said eventually. ‘Are you on TV?’

  ‘But he knows you too,’ Natalia pointed out.

  ‘Are you on TV as well, Abigail?’ Tia wondered. ‘Or in movies? You know each other from red carpet events, Oscars after-parties, green rooms.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  His name was Finnegan. He worked with Tia at a graphic design studio in Lilyfield. They had stayed back tonight to finish a project, and Tia had invited him along to the party.

  Finnegan and I both took sips from our drinks, and gazed at each other.

  *

  At some point later that night, I found myself in the front room of the house. A sitting room: a couch, a piano, a huge sack of cat kibble.

  Finnegan sat beside me on the couch.

  The room was dark, the only light from the street outside. I do not know why we had not turned on the light. I think we couldn’t find the switch.

  We were facing the piano.

  ‘You play?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit. You?’

  ‘Used to.’

  We slouched on the couch.

  ‘Scales are funny,’ I said, remembering. ‘Your fingers run up the keyboard, and you keep putting your thumb under so you can reuse the same fingers. You can go forever because your thumb finds an ingenious way to recycle.’ Recycling was on my mind.

  ‘But you can’t go beyond the keyboard,’ Finnegan pointed out.

  ‘No, you turn around and come back down,’ I agreed. ‘So you cover the same ground. It’s back and forth, it’s up, full of hope, and back down to the bleak, then up, then down. And so on.’

  ‘I used to make up stories on my piano,’ Finnegan told me. ‘The low notes were scary, the dungeons and woods. The high notes were like happy little elves.’

  ‘Me too.’

  We tilted our heads back, stared at the dark ceiling.

  ‘Kierkegaard thinks that music begins where language ends,’ Finnegan said. ‘Beyond language—or when language reaches its peak—you get music.’

  I considered that. ‘I can’t believe we’re talking about Kierkegaard,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not. I am. And the same is true if you go in the other direction, he said. Because the simpler words become, the more they’re just sounds, and sounds are music.’

  ‘So music is like parentheses around language?’

  ‘Exactly. Or music is everything. This small segment of everything is language. Our conversation. Everything outside it is music.’

  I sat beside Finnegan in our small segment of language while everything else was music.

  ‘I like that,’ I admitted.

  In the moon glow, or maybe it was streetlight glow, you could see that the piano was shadow-dusty. There were ornaments on top of it, and framed photographs. On the lid, a bowl of chips and a jacket.

  ‘Shall we play?’ Finnegan suggested.

  He stood and put the chips on the window ledge. I lay the jacket on the couch.

  We sat side by side on the stool, and lifted the lid.

  The white keys glowed strangely. The black merged with the darkness. We squinted down.

  First, we played scales. I played down the scary end, he played at the fun pitch, but our hands kept meeting and entangling, his hands over mine, mine over his.

  This reminded me of games that children play, clapping hands together, holding hands to form rings. Piling hands like a stack of pancakes, a continual stacking, as endless as scales.

  Other people’s hands. So intimate, so tangly and strange.

  I was thinking all this while we were playing.

  Somebody came to the door and watched us, leaning against the frame. A big guy. He wanted to say something funny. The alertness in his cheeks and eyes told me this. But after a minute, he turned and walked away, leaving us to it.

  We stopped playing. Sat on the stool, hands resting on the piano keys.

  ‘I know you,’ Finnegan said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ve done this. I know you too.’

  ‘I know where I know you from.’

  ‘You do not.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Italian Cooking for Beginners.’

  It was a deep-breath moment. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No way.’

  ‘You came late to the first class,’ he said. ‘Everyone had to share their food with you.’

  Astonished, I pressed middle C.

  ‘But you never came again,’ he continued.

  ‘No way,’ I whispered.

  I thought about the people in that class eating their food, casting resentful glances my way. I looked sideways at him on the piano stool. His profile in the shadows, eyes bright.

  ‘Where were you sitting?’

  ‘Down the end of the table,’ he said. ‘There was a guy beside me who talked a lot.’

  Now I remembered the chatty guy, his sentences, his cadences, and here came Finnegan, sidling into the memory, an elbow on the table, a profile, a nose, a shape, a darkness, a quick laugh, a hand on a fork, the flash of a memory, that’s it.

  ‘The only reason I signed up for that course,’ Finnegan said, ‘was because I thought I might meet a girl.’

  I laughed.

  He played an arpeggio. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I knew who you were as soon as I saw you tonight.’

  Now I turned on the seat to properly stare.

  He stopped playing. ‘I looked for you each week,’ he said. ‘You never came again.’

  ‘You looked for me?’

  ‘I know you,’ he whispered, tilting his head so his voice became an action, a gesture, a touch. ‘I told you that.’

  *

  If you want a jury to believe that something is true, say it three times.

  A barrister explained this to me once. Find a way to state your assertion three times in your opening address, he said. Three times before the case is even underway. It becomes fact.

  Three, this barrister told me, is a very powerful number.

  This is the Rule of Three.

  *

  For our first date, we saw a comedy show at the Enmore.

  For our second, we ate Korean barbecue in Surry Hills.

  Next, Finnegan invited me to his place to watch a movie and get takeaway Thai.

  He lived in a red-brick apartment building in placid Artarmon, which surprised me. I’d imagined someplace grungy and artistic like Chippendale.

 
We watched Forrest Gump. His mother had given him the video for Christmas the previous year, he said, and he hadn’t yet watched it.

  ‘Life is like a box of chocolates,’ Finnegan announced, when the movie finished.

  ‘It’s not,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not,’ he conceded at once.

  I elaborated. ‘With a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’ll get, but you can be pretty sure it’s going to be chocolate.’

  ‘And not, say, a scorpion.’

  ‘Exactly. Whereas you reach your hand into life and you can pull out a boiled egg, a scorpion or a parking ticket.’

  ‘Any of those things,’ Finnegan agreed.

  I told him that I had felt claustrophobic, driving to his place along the Pacific Highway.

  He swivelled to face me, excited. ‘I know! Those narrow lanes.’

  We slept together that night. The third date is the right time to sleep together, according to the Rule of Three.

  *

  At work, I read an 1894 case about boilermakers.

  Two boilermakers started a business not far from the cottage of one Mr Hird.

  Now, Mr Hird did not like their boilermaking. He got an injunction, shut them down.

  Understandably, the boilermakers were boiling mad.

  One day, a placard appeared, suspended between two poles on the roadway. MR HIRD IS MEAN, is more or less what it said.

  Nobody could prove who wrote the words, or who erected the placard.

  But a certain man sat on a stool on the side of the road, smoked a pipe and pointed at the placard.

  Which is more or less the same, the court concluded, as putting the thing up.

  *

  Chapter 188

  It is probably time for us to embark on a survey of western philosophy.

  I shall begin.

  Socrates.

  He wandered around asking people questions.

  Where is the help in that? He sounds insufferable. Always coming up to pester you, demanding answers.

  *

  Finnegan had never been to Taronga Zoo—he grew up in Melbourne—so I took him for his birthday.

  A woman walked past with her hand on the shoulder of a tiny boy. The boy’s face was smeared with chocolate ice-cream, and he was sobbing. The woman was shouting. ‘And if you ever, ever do that again, so help me, I will smack you!’

  The woman and boy walked on, wails fading into the distance.

  ‘These are the memories,’ Finnegan said.

  I nodded. ‘Exactly! How can she not realise that? You bring your kid to the zoo for a special day out and it’s like, can you not just be calm and patient for this one day?’

  ‘For this one day.’

  ‘Days are rare,’ I said.

  Finnegan nodded. ‘Days. Collect them. You might only get a handful.’ He was holding open the palm of his hand to demonstrate.

  We were standing in front of the giraffe enclosure now. They’re so tall, giraffes. The view behind the giraffes was Sydney Harbour. Sky was blue.

  I looked at the open palm of Finnegan’s hand.

  ‘My brother loved giraffes,’ I said.

  ‘You have a brother?’

  *

  Chapter 189

  Question everything and all that you believe, Socrates said. Are you really so brave, are you really so wise, are you really so virtuous?

  Rather than making people happy, he probably made them disconcerted, disorientated, unhappy, in the knowledge that they were not so brave, so wise, so virtuous as once they had believed. Foundation shifted beneath them.

  Did Socrates really wander around asking questions? We only have Plato’s word for it.

  It seems to me that Plato may have had a lively imagination. Certainly, many of Socrates’ conversations seem implausible.

  *

  Finnegan and I took two weeks off work and went on a trip to Paris together, my first time leaving the country.

  Finnegan’s mother is French Canadian, so he grew up speaking French with her. Handy companion for Paris.

  When we boarded the plane, there was a technical difficulty. We sat on the tarmac for three hours.

  During those three hours, Finnegan and I did all the things you ordinarily do during a flight. Read books and magazines. Discussed whether we’d remembered to pack various things. Said, ‘Yes, please,’ when they offered snacks. Ate the snacks. Watched the inflight entertainment. (They switched that on, eventually.)

  ‘We’re getting on with the flight,’ I said, ‘without getting on with the flight.’

  ‘Right?’ Finnegan said.

  After a moment he added: ‘That must be what it’s like to have a brother missing.’ He turned to me. Opened a bag of pretzels. ‘Getting on with life but life’s not moving. Is that what it’s like?’

  *

  Chapter 190

  Aristotle strikes me as important! One of the Father Figures, I believe.

  Aristotle said that the world, and all that is in it, is determined by the number three.

  Surprising! The number three, behind it all!

  I had no idea.

  Why, Aristotle? What’s your reasoning? Please.

  Well, part of his reasoning seems to be that when you have two things, say, or two men, you refer to them as both. Three is the first number to which the term all applies.

  Hence, three must be all. It must be everything.

  I understand that Aristotle is famous for his logic, but I do not find his reasoning at all convincing here.

  Nevertheless, he finds himself convincing.

  Necessarily, he says, and on all of these grounds.

  We may infer with confidence, he says, and: fire moves in a straight line.

  *

  In Paris, we stayed in Hotel Le Relais Montmartre. Our room was very small, of course. That’s the way with Paris hotel rooms.

  One night, while lying in bed, we talked about our previous relationships. I like that conversation. I like hearing the man’s stories, feeling tiny twists of jealousy. These twists are manageable: Look, he’s beside me right now. We’re in Paris. Our hands are intertwined.

  Finnegan had been in two long-term relationships. One had started when he was in year nine and ended when the girl’s family moved to New York when they were in year eleven. The other had ended when the girl got a scholarship to do a masters at Cambridge.

  ‘So girls move away,’ I said. ‘That’s what happens to you.’

  ‘That’s what happens. Where do you think you’ll go?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I promised.

  I told him about my teenage boyfriends, Samuel and Peter, and how I’d broken up with Peter when he used the word heel.

  Finnegan found that hilarious. He asked me to draw up lists of trigger words, and vowed to consult these often.

  I told him about my university boyfriends, Carl and Lachlan, and how Carl had been sort of mean.

  ‘Sort of mean, how?’

  ‘Well, he used to call me stupid.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘And when I told him about my brother, he kind of shrugged it off. He found it irrelevant that Robert was missing because he said MS would have killed him anyway.’

  ‘So Carl was the stupid one.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How long were you seeing him?’

  ‘I don’t know. About a year?’

  Finnegan thought about that. ‘Even if MS was always fatal,’ he said, ‘what, so if Carl’s house burned to the ground because of an electrical fault right when a bushfire was approaching, well, no sweat, they cancel each other out? It’s just your house, Carl. It was going to burn down either way.’

  I laughed. ‘Exactly. Exactly.’

  Finnegan went on: ‘We’ll just smile sanguinely down at the ashes, Carl. ‘Cause one way or another, that fire was coming. It was destiny. High five, let’s have a drink.’

  I looked at the ceiling of our Paris hotel room. I said, ‘But it was stupid of me t
o keep seeing him. That was like contributory negligence.’

  *

  Contributory negligence is a doctrine at common law. If you have contributed to your own injury through carelessness, this can be used as a defence.

  ‘I don’t have a law degree,’ Finnegan said, ‘but Carl can’t use that defence.’ He turned sideways in the bed. ‘Still,’ he said to my shoulder, ‘you ought to be shot for putting up with him.’

  *

  Around this time, I finally relented and began to call Finnegan Finn. I’d been so attached to Finnegan. The syllables.

  ‘This is a terrible thing to say,’ I told Finn one day, ‘but sometimes I think it’s worse losing my brother than it would be to lose a child.’

  When you speak to Finn, he becomes still. He stops what he is doing.

  He was scooping ice-cream from a tub, and he stopped. The spoon in his hand. His face still.

  ‘Because you already have yourself before you have a child,’ I explained. ‘And so you have that self to go back to. But I had Robert all my conscious life. All of me is me-and-Robert. Without Robert, I’m just making it up. Inventing myself as I go along.’

  ‘Not a terrible thing to say,’ Finn said. ‘Anyway, a terrible thing happened to you. Say what you like.’ After scooping ice-cream, he added, ‘Do you think it’s been harder for you to lose Robert than it has been for your mother?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Definitely not. It’s been worse for her.’

  Finn waited.

  ‘Oh, well, but that’s different,’ I said. ‘This is Robert we’re talking about.’

  To change the subject, I told Finn about the Rule of Three. How the barrister told me that if you say something three times it’s true.

  ‘Do you know what I did while I walked back from counsel chambers that day?’ I said. ‘After he told me that?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I whispered to myself: He’ll come back, he’ll come back, he’ll come back.’

  Finn put the ice-cream scoop down. He wrapped his arms around me and crushed me against him. I could feel him trying not to cry, trembling with it.

  ‘He will,’ Finn promised. ‘Your brother will come back.’