Image: ‘Black Cocktatoos’ by © Dana Kinter, from the cover of Rain Birds (2017) by Harriet McKnight.
We drive into Bemm River, a town I have never visited yet feel I know. It is a whisper of a town on a saltwater inlet: a bait and tackle shop, a cafe, a pay phone, a caravan park. A single-storey hotel with fairy lights is one of the few points of dissonance. In the drafts I read of Harriet’s novel, I always imagined the hotel as two storeys. Other than that, I may as well have driven into her book. Boney Point—the setting of Harriet’s 2017 novel Rain Birds—was fictional, but this place was the inspiration.
As we poke around, swatting mozzies and gazing at the water, I watch for Harriet’s characters. On the boat ramp, plovers cause a pelican to make an ungainly splash in the water. Lace-winged cicadas rest on the white walls of the public toilet. I am trying to find meaning here, trying to fill the gaping hole that has opened inside me—to find life is fiction too, and that the events of the last few days aren’t real. It’s Sunday morning, still early, two days after Harriet’s funeral.
*
When I first start working at the Canary Press, Harriet, the managing editor, is in Bermagui, working at a gelato shop. And then, she is back in Melbourne. The day I meet her, we eat sandwiches at La Paloma and I tell her I know Bermagui, that my parents have a place just down the road in Mystery Bay, and there it is, the first thing we share. Later, when Harriet and I decide to be critique partners, I am intimidated. The decision is based on proximity and friendship. But unlike her—recently shortlisted in a prestigious national award—there is nothing to recommend me as a writer. Still, we are both just getting started with our manuscripts and figure that even if all we can offer the other is accountability it will be worth it.
*
At the beginning of 2016 we spend a week together at Mystery Bay—our very own writing retreat. We spend the mornings and afternoons writing, moving around each other to fetch cups of tea. We swim each day, cook dinner together in the evenings, and we talk about writing and life, letting loose fragile, luminous dreams.
On the long drive home, a bite high on the back of my thigh begins to swell, red-hot until it is the size of a saucer. In a public toilet somewhere in Gippsland, having self-diagnosed Lyme disease, I pull down my shorts to get a second opinion. Managing to keep a straight face, she reassures me that the target mark on my bum is just an overachieving mozzie bite.
*
Our friendship deepens in the real world and equally in the imagined worlds we are writing. As we exchange chapters, her book is a teenager who somehow manages to grow through a beautiful adolescence. I have a steering problem. When exposed to my careening ideas, Harriet doesn’t raise an eyebrow. She never says don’t be ridiculous. Instead, she considers each suggestion. One time Harriet sends feedback starting with: Holy heck! This is great! Those words become part of me, and who I am as a writer. I submit the holy heck draft to the Richell Prize, and it is longlisted and then shortlisted.
Our comments get closer, bolder. We grow confident in our critique; in each other’s ability to hear what we have to say. Assertive but sweet—the deadly combo. When she has a point she wants to emphasise, she’ll lean forward and grasp my wrist. Remember this.
*
Harriet’s novel debuts in September 2017. She’s living in Darwin by then but is back in town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, and the day it comes out we go into bookstores to see it on the shelves. Staff recognise her and come over. She plays it cool; I don’t bother. My friend has published her book! This world she created is enclosed between a burnished gold cover. The launch is held at Readings. We go to drinks afterwards and here she is among her family and all those who love her, and life is good and full of hope. Before I leave, I ask my husband to take a photo. Harriet stands tall, poised and grinning; my hands are thrown around her waist. It is the one photo I have of the two of us.
*
It takes another six months for me to send her the second draft of my novel. I know she is busy with work and writing. I know she has been feeling unwell and often spends the weekend in bed. I have poured myself into it. When she sends through her feedback, she texts first to prepare me. I can feel it coming, the gulf between what I want to hear and what she says.
She tells me novel-writing always puts her in mind of the three peaks challenge, where crazy people attempt to scale three peaks in three days. You climb the first mountain and come down exhilarated, and then you climb the second, give it your all. You come down in the dark and there is still a third mountain waiting. She tells me I still need to climb the third mountain.
I stew. I sulk. I try and find excuses. I am at the top of a mountain, and I don’t want to come down, let alone turn around and slug straight up another. She is patient, kind, steadfast. She has sat at that apex. She knows. She tells me firmly, kindly, that my book is not ready. Not yet.
*
Soon after, she messages about test results, and from there the months collapse. Time turns inside out. We text every couple of days. She is tired and busy with appointments. Before long our conversations are about unimaginable things.
At 6am on the morning of her operation to remove the tumour, she sends me a birthday message for the following day as she will be in ICU and won’t have her phone.
In the absence of any deity to pray to, I hurl thoughts and love towards her across the miles separating us. Sometimes it takes me hours to compose a text. We have shared hundreds of thousands of words—and now I don’t know what to write. Words have taken on the consistency of sodden cardboard. Once strong, they are now a flaccid mess. I try to inflate them with comfort, levity and optimism, but there is always a puncture.
*
When I visit her in Bermagui after the operation, she asks me to talk, to waffle on because she’s tired and struggling to maintain a conversation. I tell her about the changes I’m making to my novel, and I feel like I’m standing on the end of a plank, talking about my writing now. But I do, and I can see how much she still cares, despite everything.
*
Back home, worry inhabits my body. I greet it in the morning and say goodnight to it before sleep. A week and a half of silence. I potter on with a heavy heart, the teaching-writing-editing equivalent of pushing food around my plate, I google what not to say—absorbing helpful lists from survivors. I send texts ending with no need to reply. I’m thinking of you. I love you. An update from another close friend. Harriet’s been airlifted back to hospital in Sydney, but they’re doing this and doing that. I send her a photo of a dingo pup, hoping to make her smile, oblivious to what is possible, what the doctors have now told her.
*
The day Harriet died, I didn’t know she was dying and yet my brain was electric with the thought of her. Later, when I heard the news, I collapsed on the stairs.
I don’t remember much, but I remember the phantom sensation of someone gripping my wrist while I wept. The spot tingled for days.
*
Somehow, after the funeral, after our detour to Bemm River, we drive home.
Grief is taut, consuming and harrowingly lonely. Harriet had kept her illness private. Not a fan of social media, she asked for there not to be posts. Her loss hits our community like buckshot, scattering us into dens of sorrow and disbelief.
At some point, I gather up my characters. They must be told if we are to go on with this. They huddle together, a weary cast, the tensions of the plot put aside as if they are actors at tea break. When I tell them she is gone, the silence pools. The birds quieten. The shadows stretch. For they are a part of me, and she is a part of them. Their faces bend with hurt, senseless. It is cold there in the shadow of the mountain.
*
I want dearly to say I’ve finished my novel. Harriet would want dearly for me to have finished my novel. What can I say? After all that happened, the third peak turned into an insurmountable mountain range. For a long time, I wandered lost in the dells and valleys. The price of letting someone so deeply into your work is that they become an indelible part of it—ever-present in the dialogue they edited, the scene they tweaked, the plot point they fought for. In the end, I couldn’t bear to lose more of her. I put that draft in a drawer, changed the manuscript’s name and started over.
*
Whenever I go into a library, I visit Rain Birds on the shelves. I look at the yellowed pages and think of the people who have read it. I hold it in my hands and marvel at this piece of her, still here, still conjuring a spark-dry town and a flock of meaty black cockatoos. I hold that book, and I hold grief and hope. I hold her.
