Into My Arms (8 page)

Nell almost laughed, but stopped herself in deference to Skye’s palpable discomfort. To be married thirty-two years, and not ever to have looked away, or imagined different hands, a different body . . . it wasn’t possible. Skye would learn that, though it sounded like she might have already.

‘Oh, honey,’ she said gently, reaching out to stroke her daughter’s hair. ‘Of course I did. You know Charlie and I loved each other very much, but we were both human. It didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything.’

‘So you fucked around,’ Skye stated bluntly.

Nell winced. ‘Not exactly. Not at all, after the first year or two. Maybe a bit before then, but we were never particularly conventional, you know that. We didn’t do it for the sake of it, but we’d agreed that we could sleep with other people if we really wanted to, as long as we told each other, and our relationship always came first.’ She shrugged. ‘It sounds naive, but that’s how it was then. It didn’t matter,’ she repeated. ‘Is that what you’re worried about? Staying faithful to Hamish?’

She felt Skye stiffen beside her in the bed. ‘I’m not
worried
about anything,’ she said, emphasising the word. ‘I just wondered, that’s all. When did you stop?’

Nell lay there in the darkness, thinking, still stroking Skye’s hair. It was so long ago. ‘Once it got serious, I guess. Once I knew that your dad was who I wanted to be with always, and not just for that week.’ A vision of Charlie as he’d looked when they first met flashed into her head: long hair, large hands, and that terrible waistcoat, so tatty and stained that she’d thrown it out a year into their marriage. She wished she’d kept it now.

‘You didn’t change your mind, not even for a month or two?’

Nell shook her head. ‘We decided to get married pretty quickly after that. I would have been happy just to live together, but it was your father’s idea. He never did anything by the book, except that.’

Still Skye persisted. ‘And you never wanted anyone ever again, not even after we were born?’

‘Well, you took a long time to be born, didn’t you? All those years of trying, and then the IVF.’ Nell rolled against Skye and put her arms around her. ‘But no, not really. Maybe once or twice, but I honestly can’t remember. We were both too worn out from looking after twins.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Skye, finally relaxing and snuggling back against her. ‘You got lucky, didn’t you?’

‘Sure did,’ murmured Nell into her hair. ‘Two babies on only our second go. A boy and a girl, perfect and healthy.’ Lucky, she wanted to add, that they had been living in Melbourne, where all the IVF research was taking place. Lucky, too, that she and Charlie had survived the process, when so many marriages went under from the strain. All those tests and drugs, the endless waiting—but it had brought them closer in the end. After their years of infertility, when Skye and then Arran were lifted from her body, bloody and screaming, it felt to Nell as if she and Charlie had truly made them. Not just conceived them, but put them together cell by precious cell. She’d first seen them, barely zygotes, under a microscope in the clinic’s lab. How many other parents could say that?

Beside her, Skye had fallen asleep. Nell wondered if she should wake her up and send her back to her own bed, but knew she wouldn’t. She’d missed the warmth of a body next to hers, the comfort of having a fellow traveller alongside throughout the night. It wasn’t like Skye to need her either, and she wanted to be there in case her daughter woke again. Of her children, Skye was more likely to confide in her than Arran, but she rarely needed to. Skye was an open book. She’d fitted in easily wherever they went: from country to country, school to school. Sport had made sure of that. Skye excelled at gymnastics, but she quickly mastered whatever she turned her hand to. There was always a place for her in the netball team or the swimming squad, and friends came easily from that. For Arran it had been different. He’d never liked football or soccer or cricket, whatever it was the other boys were playing. People rarely guessed that he and Skye were twins—though technically, Nell corrected herself, they weren’t. She eased her arm out from under Skye’s body. As part of the IVF procedure, both embryos had been placed in her uterus at the same time. People did that more frequently back then, returning two or three or even four zygotes to the womb at once, so as to maximise their chances of success. Perhaps, Nell wondered, it would have been better if they’d done separate transfers. If they had, and assuming both were successful, Arran and Skye would have simply been siblings, rather than twins. That way maybe no one would have expected Arran to be as sporty as his sister, or Skye to have stayed at school as long as Arran had done.

Nell sighed and rolled over, away from Skye. It was a stupid thought. She and Charlie had been lucky to have children at all, when so many others on the program had been left with nothing to show for all the injections, the scans, the emotional and financial outlay. And Arran was fine. The break-up with Mark had been tough on him, and there were all those years after he dropped out of law school when she feared he’d never settle, never find what it was he wanted to do. But he had eventually, hadn’t he? He seemed to be really enjoying his new job; when he came over for dinner he spoke about it with a light in his eyes. It was ironic but somehow so apt that he’d ended up helping others find their place in society, when he’d taken so long to fit in himself.

And Skye. Lovely, sunny Skye. Nell turned back over and pushed herself up on one elbow so that she could watch her daughter sleeping, just as she’d done when she was a baby. Arran had had colic, but Skye had slept right through his screaming, even though their cribs were side by side. What was it that was troubling her now? Something was going on. Anything that had to be discussed in the middle of the night must be more than a mere hypothetical. Were she and Hamish having problems? They fought occasionally—or rather, Skye argued with him—but they’d been together for two years now, since Skye was twenty-four. Maybe Hamish had proposed, and she was getting cold feet? Nell lay back down and closed her eyes.
Had
she felt any doubts before marrying Charlie? She couldn’t be certain, but her gut told her no. He would have saved her on that ferry, she thought, sinking into sleep. Greece or Scotland, Charlie would have got them all safely to the shore.

9

Zia turned his key in the lock and slowly pushed the front door open. Without meaning to, he held his breath, listening intently for any sound of activity. There was none.

Farid pushed past him, banging his schoolbag against the back of Zia’s legs. ‘Madar?’ he called, thumping into the kitchen of their small flat. ‘Madar?’

Zia ran after him, but quietly, like a panther. ‘Don’t yell,’ he hissed, catching his younger brother by the arm. ‘She might be asleep.’

Farid looked up at him, dark eyes angry. ‘Then I will wake her up. She should come to school to meet us, like she used to.’

‘She needs to sleep,’ said Zia, though he didn’t really know why. It was the explanation his father gave whenever she didn’t join them for dinner or head out to the market in the morning. Zia couldn’t actually remember the last time his mother had been to the market. She had gone every day when they first arrived in Australia, getting up early to secure the cheapest groceries and the freshest produce, but lately it seemed to be his father who did the shopping, leaving after Zia and Farid had gone to school, returning more often than not with the wrong cut of lamb or overripe fruit.

Farid wrenched his arm from Zia’s grasp and made a dash for their parents’ bedroom. Before Zia could stop him, he had barged through the door and thrown himself onto the bed, where he curled up against his mother. She didn’t look as if she had been asleep, Zia thought, following his brother into the darkened room. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. As Farid nestled against her she roused herself to stroke his hair, but didn’t look at him.

‘Madar,’ Zia whispered in Farsi, ‘do you need anything?’

His mother slowly turned her face towards him, blinking to bring him into focus. ‘Zia,’ she said, almost formally. ‘There is washing to be hung out. I meant to do it this morning, but . . .’ Her voice trailed off. With an effort she went on, ‘And if you could perhaps start the dinner? Your father should be home soon.’

Zia lingered at the foot of the bed, waiting to see if she would ask him about school or even tell him to do his homework, but she had gone back to gazing at the ceiling. Beside her, Farid was sucking his thumb. For a moment, Zia felt an urge to lie down with them, to bury his face in his mother’s neck as he had when he was little, to close his eyes, to smell her rosewater and face cream while she told him the ancient story of Simurg and the pomegranates and the god who had three sons. ‘Yet I am richer,’ she had always added at the end of the story, leaning down to kiss him on the forehead, ‘for I have four,’ and he would wriggle under her lips until she tickled him. It had been a long time since he had heard the tale.

The washing was all tangled. His mother had obviously thrown in everything she could find, turned it on and then left it, overwhelmed. Zia had to strain to drag it from the ancient machine, and as he hauled out a jumper entwined with a pair of jeans the heavy lid fell and hit him across one bicep, the blow resonating down to the bone. He rubbed the area ruefully. Last week the lid had got him across his shoulders.

Zia’s arm still ached as he stretched up to hang the wet clothes on the washing line. Still, at least he was alone in the communal courtyard today, no one else here to blow smoke at him or mutter about terrorists. Zia didn’t like living so close to other people. The smells of their cooking clogged the hallways; their arguments came through his bedroom walls late at night. Worst of all, there was nowhere for him and Farid to play save for this grubby concrete square littered with cigarette butts. The one time they’d tried to kick their football here—a real football, not the red egg-shaped one that all the boys at school were so in love with—the smokers had laughed and the women hanging out their washing had shouted at them to go away.

Shiraz had been different, Zia thought, shaking out one of his father’s shirts and remembering to peg it from the bottom. There were many gardens in Shiraz, parks and fruit trees that no one minded if he climbed or kicked his ball against. They had had a proper home there. He’d had his own room, rather than having to share with Farid, who wheezed at night and sometimes wet the bed. There had always been someone visiting—cousins, aunts, friends—someone for his father to talk to or his mother to laugh and gossip with over coffee. There had been his older brothers.

Zia leaned over the washing basket while he blinked back the tears that stung his eyes. It wouldn’t do for his father or Farid to come out and see him crying. Farid would only cry too, and his father would be angry.
We need to look forward, not back
, he was always exhorting his wife.
This is our country now.
But his mother didn’t believe it, Zia could tell. How could she, when Iman and Habib were still living somewhere on the other side of the world?

Or at least she hoped they were. They all did. Zia knew the story now; knew it as well as that fairytale about the pomegranates and the three sons. The family had had to leave Iran quickly. Why, he wasn’t sure, but it was something to do with some papers and religion and his father. There had been frantic conversations that stopped as soon as Zia came into the room; there had been his mother’s tears and the worried line etched between his uncle’s eyes. One night, still sharp in his memory, there had been such a loud knock at their door that it had woken him from his sleep. Zia had leapt out of bed and peered into the hallway, but was promptly ordered by his parents to return to his room and not come out again. He had lain in bed much as his mother did now, eyes open in the darkness, the staccato tread of unfamiliar footsteps echoing throughout the house. Later, when they had gone, his father came into his room and told him not to worry, that it had all been a mistake. Yet the next afternoon when he returned from school, his mother had placed a plate of figs and cheese in front of him and announced that they were moving to Australia.

Over dinner he found out more. That they would leave within the week, as soon as they could and apply for refugee status on arrival. Iman and Habib would remain behind, but only temporarily. It was too expensive, Zia’s father explained, for all six of them to fly so far at once. Iman and Habib would live with Zia’s uncle and his family. Iman had already left school, and Habib would do so shortly. They could defer their university studies and find work, which would ease the burden on their uncle’s household; maybe they could even help fund their own airfares once the rest of the family had settled in Australia. It would just be for a short time.

Only it wasn’t. That had been almost three years ago, and there was still no sign of Iman or Habib. They had written faithfully for the first year, as had Zia’s uncle. Then the letters had petered out, finally stopping altogether. Months went by with no news, until one day a card had arrived from another member of the family, asking someone to ring him. Zia’s father took the number to their caseworker, a young girl fresh from a social work degree, who arranged a phone card and guided him through the international codes. They hadn’t seen her much lately, Zia reflected, reaching for the litter of socks at the bottom of the washing basket. She had helped them with their application for a visa, but had warned it would be a long wait. He supposed there wasn’t much else she could do until it either came through or was refused.

With the girl’s assistance, Zia’s father had made the call back to Iran, but the distant cousin that he spoke with was curt, guarded. Zia’s uncle had been harassed, he reported. There had been more visits in the middle of the night; there had been veiled threats. Zia did not know if his older brothers had been told why their father had had to leave the country, but no doubt feeling responsible for this fresh danger and wishing to protect their uncle and his family they had in turn fled themselves. No one knew that they were planning to leave, or where they had gone. The cousin said that Zia’s uncle was too afraid to make contact with his brother in case it was somehow traced, but that he would find a way to let him know when and if he received any news of his sons.