How was the party? I’ve hardly seen you. I mean, all that promotion stuff was yesterday, right? Was it fun? And The Morning Show? I missed it with the school run.

  The air around us was warm and close, sticky. A small breeze came up from the land below and cooled our faces. I felt it first stirring at my arm, then my cheek. The breeze subsided. I shrugged, sucking on the cigarette. How’s Lex? I asked.

  Ergh, she groaned. It feels never-ending. You know, I only have ask her to do something, like pick her top up of the floor, say, or take her wet towel to the bathroom and she gives me this scowl, like she thinks I am an idiot and why on earth should she do what I ask of her, because I’ve become, in her eyes, a new irrelevance. It’s like she’s striving to make me irrelevant, because the alternative is unbearable – like the process of self-definition happens through the negative, by erasing me, working herself out against me. Without this, what? To acknowledge me, and to become herself – these two things are incompatible, mutually exclusive. She hisses at me sometimes, you know. She does it when she pushes past me, rather than just doing the thing I’ve asked her to do. The whole fainting thing – it’s the thought of the inside of my body that repulses her.

  Somewhere nearby a small wind chime was disturbed by the breeze, two bells lightly striking against metal. She stubbed out her cigarette, swilled her coffee. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just the weather.

  And it was true, everywhere was so hot; it was too hot outside, too hot inside. The humidity made everyone feel cramped and irritated – thick, damp air stuck to the skin, and seemed to resist all human movement. Trapped you inside it. On the horizon, mountainous grey clouds were building. Maybe a summer storm, May said, later today.

  I had come unprepared for daily life lived under this kind of heat, bringing with me little more than I had on the ship: some jeans, a bikini, a sarong, a dress for those cruise dinners and the prize ceremony in New York. I noted this to my sister, as we stepped out into the yard with our cups, a layer of sweat like an oily coating, a kind of film, springing up over the whole surface of my body. It was almost eleven. Adam had left for work at first light, he’d be back after dinner. We had the rest of the day to ourselves, she said, as if our keeping company were somehow illicit.

  I’m desperate to get out, she said. I really haven’t been out since the surgery. I asked her whether it wasn’t still too soon, but she said no. We should go shopping, she said. Besides, you need things. Let me just have another coffee.

  OK, I said then, sure.

  We parked in the underground car park and took the lift to the department store, stepping out into a haze of perfume and bright lights. I followed May, pleased for the distraction of the outing, as she turned left then right, taking the route as it appeared before her, the shiny white path weaving through the merchandise. Black-suited women hovered at the edge of this, watching for our approach and smiling their bright smiles. They encouraged us with small rectangular flags of cardboard on which they had sprayed their scent. Ladies? each one said to us, holding out her card, Good morning, ladies, Welcome, ladies, Can I interest you, ladies? I held my breath a little and pursed my lips, offering a curt smile as we passed through. I felt dazed by the lights and the mirrors and the glow of the white marble floor. May walked ahead, sure of her way through the labyrinth of merchandise. Around us every brand of perfume – and behind this, deeper into the building, the skincare and make-up – had its own self-contained set of shelves positioned in formation within ornate carousels, each with its own inner chamber into which a woman could be invited. The marble path wound its way through these, leading this way and that, confusing me.

  Over here! May called. I spotted her far off, near the hats, but wasn’t sure which path would take me there most directly. I needed to find the womenswear section – I’d been living out of a suitcase for weeks, with my party dress crushed against a pair of sneakers and a plastic bag full of dirty underwear and socks. I looked around. There was surely an order to the layout of sections here, a path leading out, but when this was overlaid with vertical and oblique mirrors, some at shoulder height, some higher up, combined with the echo of piano music – all this made me disoriented. The sales assistants, they must stand in wait for this, they must come to know the appearance of sudden helplessness, of exhaustion, a moment marked simply by the woman, me, stopping, looking around, looking around again, and sighing deeply. She puts her hand to a tube of face cream or mascara while she wonders what to do next, where she was supposed to go, how she got here, what she came for in the first place. She touches it, the small tube in front of her. She is mildly curious, mildly alarmed – albeit in a distracted way – at the variations of the one product: mascara for curly lashes, for false-lash effect, in colours from black through to electric blue. I was just putting this back into its plastic hole in the display unit when a white-coated woman appeared out of nowhere and, waving her arm between my body and the row of eye products, asked if I needed any help. I must have appeared startled, for she smiled very gently, then held out an oval-shaped mirror so that my own fatigued appearance was made plainly visible to me. With her free hand she touched a palette of eye shadows. These colours would look stunning on you, she said.

  I’m OK, I replied, snapping out of something. I just got distracted. I’m actually looking for someone. I turned round, peeked above the rows of shelves – my sister was nowhere in sight.

  It’s complimentary, the saleswoman said, noting my paralysis. The makeover. And if you buy one of the products you get another at a discount. If you buy three items, though, you get a fourth free. Here, she said, gently touching the sleeve of my shirt. Why not take a break? she asked.

  I am tired, I thought to myself, I am tired after all, telling myself this as a form of justification as I sat down on the stool and arranged my bag on my lap. I could wait here, like this, I thought, and my sister will come back and find me. But if you see her, I said, she’s wearing a pale-yellow dress.

  The saleswoman seemed not to hear me. Now, she said, I’m just going to match the colours first. If you could close your eyes? I did as I was told. I felt the warmth of her face leaning close to mine, then the cool tip of a brush as it worked a creamy ointment into the crevices of my eyelid, then into the dip between the corner of the eye and the bridge of the nose, then across the deeper curve where the eyeball sinks back into the skull. I’m just getting rid of all those shadows, she said. The brush continued to move in tiny feathery motions over my skin. You want to get right in there, she said, and get rid of those darker bits. As if a face should be flat, without curvatures. Non-dimensional. With her free hand she placed her fingers against my temple, preventing my head from swaying away from the brush. Her fingertips were very cool, her touch very light. It was an easy touch to want more of. If you could open your eyes and look up? And close again? Beautiful, she said. Every time I opened my eyes she was there in front me, very close, I could see the fine, pale hair across her cheek, the freckles on the bridge of her nose. In that moment I was a child once more, standing still with my eyes closed while someone wiped my face with a warm flannel, gently brushed my hair, and helped me push my arms through the sleeves of my sweater – in that moment I was that very same person being so gently prepared for the world, made ready, loved. For how long had she been gone, that child? I wondered where my sister had got to, and if she was looking for me, but I couldn’t open my eyes because the sales assistant was holding my chin with her free hand while she used a new brush, a slightly spongy brush, to work something into my lash line. When I was a child and couldn’t sleep, Joan would sometimes sit at my bedside and stroke me in not so dissimilar a fashion, running her fingertips very lightly over the translucent skin of my eyelids. On those wakeful evenings I couldn’t keep my eyes closed – I couldn’t sleep, I said, because my eyes wouldn’t stay shut, each time I tried to close them they would just spring open again although there was nothing in particular I wanted to look at, nor was I really even seeing anything when my eyes were open. The closing of the eyes and the keeping them closed was a basic law of sleep that as a child I easily forgot, and so Joan would come and gently remind me of this. She would pull the covers up to my chin and perch on the corner of the mattress, the springs creaking as her weight sank into the bed. The mattress would tilt a little, and I would roll towards her, my knees resting against her fat hip. Now, she’d say, close your eyes, as her fingertips glided down over my eyelids, as far as my cheekbones, where they would lift off and start back again above my brows. My sister would be sound asleep by then, giving out little snorts and snores, completely oblivious to my struggle. And Joan would say, as I turned my head towards my sister’s bed, Now never you mind about her, it’s you I’m interested in, and her fingers would glide down again over my eyes, and again, and again. At that time of the evening her hands smelt faintly of the washing-up liquid that she had squirted into the sink and of the rubber gloves that she wore to withstand the heat of the water. Over the top of this floated the sweeter scent of the cream she massaged into her hands once the kitchen had been put in order, and the slightly sour tang of the Vaseline jelly that she applied into her cuticles where they were often cracked and torn from the cold. Sometimes, during the day she would chew on the little tags of white skin that came loose from the edge of her nails, and when she had at last shorn them off there would be small red dots, like little pinpricks. Again and again and again her fingers stroked my face, just as a river might carve its way into the earth through centuries of rain, and beneath her fingertips I could feel my eyes slowly losing their hardness, I could feel my eye sockets loosening their hold, and I would fall asleep then under the spell of Joan’s hands, under the fat padded fingers, a little greasy from the creams, sometimes puckered and creased on the tips if the washing-up gloves turned out to have a hole in them.

  There, came the saleswoman’s voice. She lifted the brush away from my eyes. I could feel the heat from her body close to mine, the intensity of her presence as she scrutinised her handiwork, my skin. You can open your eyes now, she said. Everything was blurry. A large silvery disk wobbled in front of my face: the woman, holding out a mirror. I blinked. She held the mirror closer, then flipped it over to reveal another mirror of greater magnification. Before I could get up she started on her monologue, explaining the prices and discounts and potential improvements to skin tone and other lasting effects of the product. I averted my gaze, stood to go. That’s lovely, I said. Thank you. But I really have to find someone now. Where was she?

  I could smell the make-up on my face. My eyelashes felt heavy with the triple coat of mascara. I couldn’t see May anywhere. I reached for my phone then realised it was back at the house, turned off in the drawer.

  Then suddenly she was there beside me. Found you! she said. She had got what she wanted. I’m so sorry, she told me, but we really have to go. Did you pick up the things you came for?

  I had forgotten what I needed. Anyway, she said, if not, we can always come back tomorrow – it’s just that Lexi has swim squad this afternoon. Normally it’s on Thursday morning, but because of various Christmas events and school carnivals, they’ve moved this week to the afternoon. I’m really sorry, it totally slipped my mind, but I have to swing by the school and pick her up, I’m afraid we don’t have time to stop off at the house. Do you mind?

  No, I said, of course not.

  Jess is going to a friend’s place, Adam will pick her up on his way home. It’s just Lexi. It should only be an hour or so, max.

  As we drove up out of the underground car park I was dazed by the light. The fluorescent glare of the mall was one thing, the Antipodean glow quite another: luminous, almost other-worldy, the kind of light that penetrates every atom of the body, every cell, as if the body might be broken down by it. Thinned out. Disintegrated. I rifled through my handbag to find my sunglasses. Then I lifted them to the light, checking the state of the lenses, the smear marks. My shirt cuffs fell back from my wrists. The bruising was still there, fading, soon to be gone. How hard he’d gripped my wrists. Don’t, don’t do this. One of us had said that. Please. May watched the traffic, waiting for a gap that would let her turn out on to the street. A wide yellow circle on each inner wrist, a few small dark capillaries showing inside these, like something under a microscope. I pressed my thumb to the most colourful bruise, testing its tenderness. At the time of questioning no one had thought to ask me about this, there was no need to examine me – it was not, after all, the state of my body that was under investigation. After this I had been careful to keep these marks hidden, at the prize ceremony, and later, when my picture was taken for the newspaper. I put my hands in my pockets or stood in such a way that my inner wrists were held close to my body, the bruises out of sight.

  I wiped at the lenses and pushed the glasses on to my face.

  16

  We collected Lexi from outside the school gates and drove to the indoor pool, dropping her at the entrance before May found a parking spot under the shade of a tree. The air conditioning in the car was cold, and stepping out into the blazing sun made me dizzy. I felt a little sick again; maybe it was the weather after all and not the jet lag. On the road, patches of tarmac were melting in the heat. At the entrance to the sports complex the automatic doors slid open – a burst of humid, chlorinated air ringing with the yells of children. We stepped inside and the doors slid shut behind us. There was the smell of ice cream and chips and instant coffee. May showed her entry ticket and we walked through, finding a place on the damp metal bench. Around us the air was thick and warm, tangy with chlorine. Lexi stood hunched over near the blocks, her arms folded across her abdomen as the coach issued instructions for the first laps. Her swimming cap was in place, her purple goggles pulled down over her eyes and pressed to her sockets. We could see her nodding, then pinching her nose and blowing to clear her ears. Her legs were long and thin with knobbly knees, and she pushed them together, bending them a little in a posture that suggested coldness but could not possibly mean coldness given the soupy air of the building. She was making herself smaller, making herself ready, her muscles preparing themselves for the dive and the sprint to come, for the willowy slip through water in which her prepubescent body would be made almost invisible, just as she wanted it to be, a slick of blue lycra under ripples. Back and forth, back and forth she went. At the end of each lap she somersaulted underwater, flipping her body to face the other direction, and as she pushed off from the wall a silvery stream of bubbles floated out behind her.

  In the wake of the prize I had been offered a generous contract for the next book and had signed under Ada’s enthusiasm, feeling slightly delirious and not thinking about the fact that I had no real idea what I would write. But you’re brilliant! Ada cried, and we love you and I know you’ll do something amazing. I’d agreed to this without really considering the deadline and the reality of it was now starting to sink in. I thought of all the scenes I’d cut from the previous novel and wondered if I could use them in the service of a new work. They were sections that I’d cut at Ada’s urging, and the book had gone on to succeed in just the way she hoped it would, but I still thought fondly of those scenes – so many of them loosely autobiographical. Orphaned scenes, one might call them, from a provincial life. Scenes that May had also wanted me to withhold when I told her about them.

  She didn’t like to think about these things. She certainly didn’t want to read my version of them. Whereas I preferred to leave no stone unturned. Please don’t, she said. Or maybe she said, I don’t know how you do it. I thought about those deleted sections while watching Lexi coast back and forth, back and forth, soothed by the ease of her movements, the grace of them. It was hypnotising. I felt that heavy lull beginning in my head – the opposite of a migraine, the start of any work of art. A sense of being dazed, slow, too open, distracted by all things, porous. The mind a fat, heavy bee, its thoughts bumping slowly up and up and up against the glass. Although sometimes my migraines precipitated this feeling, exaggerated it, made me more attentive: how thin and white the light could be, the smell of the air, the strange new bitterness of certain foods that had tasted quite ordinary the day before. Cheese. Peanuts. Brown bread. Everything then seems easy to imagine, hard to realise. How suddenly the world can be made strange.

  Whatever I wrote – however I had described it in one of those many scenes that were cut – it’s true that Joan died suddenly one winter’s night. It was an aneurysm, they said. She passed without a sound, and our father woke to find her this way in the morning. I’d expanded on this at one point, giving it extra colour in an earlier draft. But it didn’t need it – the event itself was plain and terrible. There was nothing else to say other than that it happened. At least that was what we were told as children, and there was never anything that made me doubt the truth of this. It was a death too sudden for my father to make sense of, and he reached the end of his line. There are only so many losses one can bear, only so much that one can accommodate, internalise, carry. He had never intended to stay in England, and once Joan died there was no reason to. He booked us flights to Sydney, took a long-term lease on a tiny second-hand bookshop on the main street of what looked like a rural ghost town, and bought a corner of land that a farmer was selling off.

  I’ll never forget that first journey, no matter how many times I delete it from one book or another. To get to our new house we took that long road west for hours. At first there were various roadside stops; a fruit stall, a diner, public toilets in a park, but after that any building looked to be abandoned – its paint flaking off, rusted cars and machinery in the front yards, overgrown grass. Here and there poplars grew along the edge of the road, some tall and well established while others stood in small thickets, having sprung up wild. It was coming into autumn and the leaves on the trees were a deep gold, like the kind of leaves one reads about in fairy tales. After a time, the trees gave way to grass, miles and miles of dry grass, stretching out into the far distance. At certain points the road ran parallel to the train tracks and in these parts there grew tall, feathery grasses with white plumes, and smaller clumps of grass with purple seed heads. When the road did not run beside the train tracks it continued on by pasture and farmland, vast stretches of dry country fenced off with barbed wire. Here and there the barbs were snagged with clumps of sheep wool, or remnants of plastic bags flapping in the wind, as weathered prayer flags might in some other faraway place. At the side of the road, along the verge, the dirt was pale. Further on it gave way to grey, lichen-covered stones, and soon after that banks of red soil. Clouds cast wide, lumbering shadows. We drove for hours. We drove with the windows down, and hot, dry air filled the car. Dust rose up behind us. In that part of the country there had been no rain for months. What would normally be green pastures, full of clover and sorghum, was then barren, the ground hard and pale. You could kick it with the heel of a boot and not break through the surface.

 

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