Me Without You (18 page)

I
t was finally
warm enough to snorkel, and I’d spent most of the day beside Lilah in Cabbage Tree Bay off Shelly Beach. I’d made a quick dash to the shopping centre for an underwater housing for my camera in the morning, and then our quick snorkelling trip had turned into an all-day event when I realised how difficult it was to take decent photos in the water and just how much there was to see under there.

As a result I had a nasty sunburn on the back of my neck and we’d tumbled into bed early, but were lying awake debriefing the sights of the day.

There was a high window in my bedroom which directly faced a cool white streetlight in the alley behind. I’d hung heavy navy curtains over it, but streaks of light still cut across the bedroom at night. I was staring down the bed, traversing the brown, navy and white doona cover that blanketed our entwined legs. In the semi-darkness, beneath the doona, we looked like one entity.

‘… that weedy sea dragon as it darted behind the rock—Callum, are you even listening to me?’ She nudged me with her elbow and twisted to look up at me.

‘Of course I was. You were talking about that seahorse thingy.’

‘You weren’t listening at all,’ her tone accused me. ‘I was talking about the crab you picked up in the rock pool.’

‘Lilah, I
was
listening to you. You finished talking about that five minutes ago. When you elbowed me you were talking about the weedy seahorse thing and how I nearly got the photo of it but it ducked behind the rock.’ The chill came over me, one that I was becoming familiar with. There was a now familiar beat to these odd moments. She’d say or do something that was just beyond quirky, and I’d tell myself she was probably exhausted. At least this time I had some evidence to back up my argument. She’d had as much sun as I, and I was feeling pretty rotten too. I tried to convince myself that she had a little sunstroke, then, to make light of it, ‘How
tired
are you?’

‘Oh. That’s right,’ she said, her voice soft and slow. And just when I began to relax she added, ‘And they aren’t sea horses. They’re sea dragons, it's a different species.’

‘I stand corrected.’ I wanted to doubt the way I knew the nuances and inflections of her tone. She was correcting my terminology mix-up as if I’d never made it before, but she’d corrected me at least a dozen times over the course of the day and now when I said the word
seahorse
I thought I was making a joke with her. I was sure she’d been in on the joke earlier. She’d roll her eyes at me but then giggle a little anyway, which was actually the only reason I’d kept on with it.

A few moments went by, and her breathing deepened. I thought she was falling asleep, until she whispered, ‘You should come to Gosford with me for Christmas.’

‘But… that’s weeks away.’

‘So?’

‘So we’re allowed to plan weeks in advance now?’ I felt instantly light inside; a helium-like joy had filled me up. ‘I must have missed the memo.’

‘I just thought you’d enjoy it. Leon and Nancy usually have some of their kids over; it’s a lot of noisy, messy, fun.’

‘It sounds fantastic. Thank you.’

‘I’m actually going to take a few weeks off. I thought… maybe you might like to take a break as well.’

‘Really?’ Maybe we really both had had too much sun and now I was imagining things.

‘May as well.’

‘That sounds…’ I was momentarily overwhelmed with happiness. A holiday with her? It was such a
couple
thing to do. The most positive sign yet, actually. ‘It sounds bloody fantastic. What will we do while we’re there?’

‘Nothing.’ The word came slowly, sleep slurring its edges. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘I could take some photos.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And I could help Leon and Nancy in the garden—they’d like that, wouldn’t they? They’d have to show me what to do though.’

She didn’t answer me, and I smiled to myself and wriggled to get comfortable on the bed. HR would be delighted to see me reduce my leave liability, and the timing was actually great—other than the traditional Tison’s rooftop New Year party with our clients, I wouldn’t miss a thing.

T
he longest break
I’d taken in my entire working life was two weeks when my parents died. So by the time we left to begin our month together at Gosford, I was actually nervous.

I had no idea what the days would look like without work to fill them. I knew Lilah had a case due to go to court only a few weeks after we got back, so she’d likely do some work here and there. My plans were simpler: I’d help Leon and Nancy out, read a book here and there, maybe take some photos and generally just do nothing. And for the first few weeks, that’s exactly what I did.

I rose early and did some work on the fruit trees with Leon and Nancy before the sun was too high. The stone-fruit season was in full swing, and Leon and I were picking fruit as it ripened, stacking it into foam boxes ready for a Christmas Eve market day. Nancy was working her way methodically through the garden doing some light pruning.

‘We used to only ever prune in winter,’ she’d told me on the first morning in the garden. ‘But now that the trees are a bit older, we also do some corrective pruning in summer. We need to keep control of the shape of the trees, and to make sure there isn’t too much growth. Growth is good but it needs to be controlled; we want the tree to conserve its energy for fruiting.’

It turned out pruning the trees was a bit of an art form, and Nancy had no hesitation in guiding my ‘art’. There was a structure they were aiming for, and by trimming the trees in the right places, they guaranteed the longevity of the tree.

‘Not there!’ Nancy exclaimed a few times when I went to make a cut with the sheers. ‘Oh, heavens, Callum. Let me do that one.’

And so the sixty-eight-year-old caretaker would push me out of the way with her artificial hip and cut through thick green branches as if they were made of butter.

There was something organic about the yard work. I felt relaxation take hold a thousand times quicker than it might have had we holidayed at a resort and tried to find peace over cocktails and man-made pools. In the evenings, I wandered the coast line, reacquainting myself with my camera and the feeling of being totally off-line. I took a few cheeky shots of Lilah as she sipped wine on the deck, or when she picked fresh herbs from the garden.

Mostly I reminded myself that life wasn’t always meant to pass by in such a blur of monotony that there was nothing worth capturing, and that realisation in itself was gold. I tumbled into bed beside Lilah those first nights, stiff and sore from unused muscles waking up, Tison Creative a billion miles from my mind.

I
’ve never been
big on Christmas—at least not since I left home, and even less so since my parents died. Lilah and Peta, on the other hand, were like two children buzzing with energy about Santa’s impending visit.

Trying to quell a growing sense of discomfort, I nursed a glass of wine while they assembled an ancient plastic Christmas tree. Peta sang carols as they decorated it with dated baubles and well-loved tinsel.

‘Do you remember when we were in New York, and there was such a dump of snow on Christmas Day that the whole city ground to a halt?’ Nostalgia interrupted her song and even slowed Peta’s rapid-fire speech.

‘I was just thinking about the year after when we were at Darwin and you were teaching at that high school, and we spent Christmas Day at that stinking bloody dam eating yabbies.’ Lilah shuddered, but it was obviously a fond memory because the smile didn’t slip from her face.

‘Or the year your father died…’ Peta started talking and I saw a look pass between them. Lilah’s brow was furrowed and she gave a subtle shake of her head. I watched all of this, then tried to reinsert myself in the conversation.

‘What happened?’

‘It was a tough year,’ Lilah said quietly, and although I knew that was surely true, I also knew instinctively that there was more to that glance she’d shot her mother. Peta, with her never-ending stream of words, would no doubt have freely shared a blow-by-blow description of the awful time, and Lilah obviously didn’t want to relive it. ‘We had Christmas here and we gave each other plants. I gave Mum one of the roses that she has in her garden where she lives in Gosford, and she gave me a bonsai which is on the balcony back at Manly.’

‘I also gave you that adorable little ceramic pot with that flowering thing, the one I found at the market.’ Peta smiled to herself at the memory.

‘The plant was dead before you even gave it to me!’

‘Yep,’ Peta winked at me. ‘Well, it seemed fitting.’

‘Peta!’ I looked to Lilah, but both women were laughing, and Lilah waved off my horror with a tinsel-wrapped hand.

‘She was kidding, Cal. Apparently plants in teeny tiny pots need lots of water. Mum and I had no idea. We still have no idea.’ Through her giggles, she flashed a look at her mother, a brief moment of shared sadness. It seemed remarkable to me that the women could make a joke about the death of their obviously much-loved husband and father.

They resumed their decorating, but I rose and walked silently out to the deck where I stretched out on the outdoor couch and stared towards the ocean. It was late evening; the sky was tinged with purple and orange, the chapter of today closing before my eyes.

Behind me, I could hear Lilah and Peta laughing and swapping Christmas memories, an emotional intimacy between them that I marvelled in. I knew very little about Lilah’s father, but I just didn’t think I needed to know details to know the depth of their loss. What was confronting to me, and all that I was focussed on at the time, was that they seemed to have come through their grief so much more intact than I had. A decade on, I still couldn’t think of my mother’s passing without my chest constricting, and I sometimes feared I’d never be able think about Dad without feeling irrationally angry that he hadn’t been able to carry on without her.

It struck me that the difference was the way they shared it. I saw it in the way they could joke about the period of their deepest grief now, and in the glowing embers of warmth which existed between them.

Ed and Will, always so much closer to each other than to me, had spent many of the days after Mum’s death together and with Dad. They were with Dad when he collapsed while writing thank-you cards to the dozens of people who’d attended the funeral. Dad had been silently staring out over the backyard, resting in the floral recliner that Mum had often sat in to read. Later Ed would tell me that he suddenly slumped forward and the twins both assumed he was crying—until the stillness registered and they realised he was in trouble.

I was alone at home at the time, not yet ready to go back to work, but somehow the idea of sitting around reminiscing for days on end had been unbearable. I’d told the others I was too busy to take time off and I’d just visit in the evening, even going so far as to don a suit each day so I wasn’t found out. I think I was actually watching a marathon of some terrible television show when the call came.

I’ve never really been sure if I regretted the decision to stay away. The very thing that would have made being there preferable—spending Dad’s last moments with him—was the same thing that would have made it agonising. I remember him as he was at dinner the night before, sad and subdued, but alive.

Ed was sobbing when he called me shortly after the ambulance arrived. The paramedics were still trying to resuscitate Dad. I always imagined that as Ed and Will watched their efforts, they would have had their arms around each other, twins with a bond between them so much stronger than the one they collectively shared with me. After Dad’s funeral and wake, Ed and Will had begged me to come back to our parents’ home for a drink. We’d held the wake at Dad’s regular pub, just a block away from the house, the place he’d walk to every Friday afternoon for beers with his mates.

I stayed for the wake of course, but then I went home. I sat alone in my unit and felt, more than ever before, the weight of my self-imposed isolation. And the next day, I did go back to work. It was both a punishment and a comfort.

‘Cal?’ Lilah was at the door, a quizzical look on her face. I sat up and raised my glass to her.

‘Just wanted some fresh air. You two carry on without me.’

‘Oh no, we need your help to put the menorah on top of the tree.’

‘You put a menorah on top of your Christmas tree?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she raised an eyebrow at me, but grinned. ‘When we were in New York, we lived across the hallway from a Jewish family. They didn’t celebrate Christmas of course but we celebrated Hanukah with them and Mum felt it was appropriate to invite them for our Christmas dinner. Guess what she served them?’

‘Please don’t say roast pork.’

‘Oh, Lilah, you make it sound so crass,’ Peta called from the living area. ‘I made an effort, Callum, I really did. I roasted a chicken
and
some pork, and I put the menorah on top of the Christmas tree to show I respected their culture. They didn’t eat the pork of course but they devoured the chicken and they had the time of their lives.’

‘It was awkward,’ Lilah assured me. ‘But somehow after that the menorah became a bit of a tradition. It’s probably horrifically offensive. But it needs to go up regardless and you’re the only one tall enough to do it.’

The menorah was plastic, spray-painted gold, and someone had clumsily glued a funnel-like piece of cardboard to the bottom so that it could slide over the top of the tree. I didn’t even need to stretch to fix it. When I stood back to admire my handiwork, Lilah slid her hand around my waist and leant into me.

‘It’s beautiful. Don’t you think?’

I hadn’t had a Christmas tree in decades. The chaos of the decorations, the lop-sided distribution and the crazy colour scheme jarred my sense of colour and style. The tinsel was so old that I could see long stretches where only cotton was left, not just around the tree, but all over the room—someone had hung it on every doorway and over most of the photos too.

And that bloody menorah was absolutely ridiculous.