2012/Outside His House
I follow him home, where he parks his white van in a carport outside a single-storey bungalow. Cronulla Marine Supplies is on the vehicle’s side in blue lettering. He wears jeans and a grey T-shirt. As he walks towards the mailbox I see he has sleeves of tattoos on both arms now, shades of blue-green and black.
‘You took someone from me.’ I say the words aloud in the car on the opposite side of the street. It isn’t my car. The paint on the bonnet is peeling and inside it smells damp.
He looks up and for a moment I think he sees me. He has the same hair; perhaps those sandy curls are a shade darker now. I remember how they felt, the shape of them in my hand. There it is, that slight tilt in his face.
I sink lower in my seat.
Rebekah says I’m still learning how to carry it, my grief, but I don’t want to hold it anymore. I want to draw a line in the ledger—to take something from him that would equal my loss—which is why I am here. To learn what that could be. It had been easy to find him; these days you just type a name into a search engine. His company website opened with a map and everything.
Rebekah says I’m still learning how to carry it, my grief, but I don’t want to hold it anymore.
I don’t know what happens to people like me, who lost someone integral in their formative years; it feels like the removal of a linchpin. Without my brother, I’m not a complete person; I’m loosened. I try to move forwards, but pieces come off. I wobble. I keep falling: over, down, apart.
Part 1: 2001/Wide Horizons
Black Christmas
I was fourteen the first time it felt like the world was ending. I kicked my bedsheet away from me, trying to move around air that was heavy with heat. I heard Dad coughing. I walked out of my bedroom in my nightie, and through the dark house.
The late news bulletin was on in the loungeroom; the sound of trumpets reverberated from the walls.
‘Can’t sleep,’ I announced as I opened the door.
‘Darling.’ My mother, Rebekah, looked up from the couch where she sat in a blue negligee. ‘You’re all flushed!’ Hair piled on top of her head, like pavlova. Dad was next to her in boxer shorts. Ice cracked in their whiskys.
‘Half the state is on fire,’ Dad said, nodding at the television.
The newsreader in blue-framed glasses declared New South Wales was in a state of emergency; a multitude of bushfires covered it. Footage showed flames taller than trees, emergency services workers back-burning, whole landscapes of charcoal. Families stood beside bent corrugated iron and small piles of bricks. Empty dog houses. Smoke rose from Cammeraygal ground, from Dharug ground, from Dharawal ground. Images from here in Sydney showed thick smog over the harbour. Pictures of the bridge against a red sky and much of the cityscape disappeared behind floating ash. On the television people wandered around Bennelong Point looking up for direction, trying to get their bearings. The top of Centrepoint Tower was obscured. The sun was high and set behind layers of pollution, the light rusted and dim.
I thought about the people who started fires: how they struck a match, lit kindling and burnt the first bush on a day so hot and dry that flames stampeded across the earth. I wondered what it felt like to watch fire destroy cattle, make horses rear up in terror. I imagined them standing as we were, seeing old people leaving nursing homes on gurneys, wide-eyed, their faces covered in oxygen masks. Watching farmers as they cried, their belongings turned into vapour. I imagined the firebugs and wondered which part of it made them happy.
‘How hot is it?’ My older brother Elijah appeared at the doorway, wearing only faded board shorts. His voice a self-answering question, his body all shinbones and forearms.
‘Weird,’ he said, joining us in front of the television, ‘like a horror movie.’
The sails of the Opera House were not ivory but carved out of red jasper. It didn’t look like the city printed on postcards. It was still ours, but it didn’t seem like home.
‘It’s a bit cooler out here,’ Dad offered from the back veranda, where he had wandered. ‘Why don’t you kids sleep on the balcony?’
My mother stood from the couch and joined Dad on the veranda; she swilled the last of her drink before kissing him on the lips. ‘I’m going to get another; do you want one, Seamus?’
Dad shook his head.
My brother and I pulled our camping mattresses onto the veranda. We lay on our backs and hoped a sea breeze would find us. Over the wooden railing I saw the dim glow of Middle Harbour and heard the slow rush of burning underneath. Dad sat down behind us and leant against the wall.
My father’s voice was low and deep, the sound of waves breaking from the floor of the ocean. He was talking about when my mother was pregnant with Elijah, more than three years before I existed, how she used to bring her cello to this spot in the evenings.
When we were younger Dad told us tales of when he was a boy, Northern Irish myths, and the years before we were born. I had to listen carefully because the storylines changed; characters merged with one another. There were sudden unexpected endings followed by new beginnings. Inside the sound of my father’s voice was a place that for as long as I could remember always made me feel safe.
Inside the sound of my father’s voice was a place that for as long as I could remember always made me feel safe.
I opened my eyes a slit and saw old rafters above me, the awning of the balcony, the floating ribs of our home. Dad’s words drifted up there, getting caught in the wood: they collected and hung in the cobwebs. My father’s voice was made in Northern Ireland, but decades after his emigration the centre of it had been ground down, worn like sea glass into the frosted-light sound of an Australian drawl. The curled edges of his voice, though, remained Northern Irish. His accent gave his words a melody and the illusion of rhyme. I heard him smile as he recalled my mother’s normally lean legs swollen in the last trimester, malleable as if made from plasticine.
‘Rebekah was as big as a house, but it sure didn’t stop her from playing.’
‘Ah, Seamus, you are so cruel to me!’ My mother rejoined us on the deck. She sat next to my father and slapped him playfully on the stomach before she rested her head on his shoulder. It was one of my favourite places, the stillness as I listened for the spaces between his words. I saw the shape of my mother’s buttocks as they half-slipped off her wooden stool to accommodate her growing abdomen. Between her thighs, the body of her cello, wood more than a hundred years dark, fell backwards. The cello’s wooden neck to the left of her own, lovers that rested on each other.
Years later, when things began to unravel, I followed strings of thought like yarn back to this: my brother and me lying head to head, his dark curls touching my own long strands of sun-bleached auburn hair. Our parents adjacent to us, soothing us with memory. It was there the string finished, the frayed end stuck to a cardboard roll. That was it. The end and the beginning, that told me the truth.
Elijah’s life began inside our mother’s, as he floated in transilluminated fluid. There would have been a short distance between my brother’s head and the curved back of the instrument. I imagined the layers between, dissected them like a surgeon through tissue, an archaeologist through earth, a worker who stripped back wallpaper. The fluid, placenta, muscle, fascia, fat, skin, the dress my mother was wearing. My brother, so much smaller than he was now, curled up. Growing, furling. Attached to my mother by a lifeline of cord. A primordial astronaut. The deep notes of the cello, the music as it passed through the layers, through waters, making vibrations, as it passed through something thinner than blood.
I heard this story so many times that pieces of its versions became something of my own. Part of my story and that of my family. Later, I would think about the way Elijah was brought into being, surrounded by warmth, and love, and music, and wonder if that was where the problems began—whether somehow, in that process, there were promises made about the nature of the world that it couldn’t keep.
This is an edited extract from Tidelines by Sarah Sasson (Affirm Press), available now at your local independent bookseller.
