Authors: Kimberley Freeman
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
2014
F
or the first time in as long as I could remember, I phoned my mother before she phoned me.
Still reeling from being booted off Anton Fournier’s front steps, I punched in her number as I walked home.
“Hello?”
“Mum? It’s me.”
The edge of panic hit her voice. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, forcing the irritation out of my voice. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t normally phone me, that’s all.”
You don’t give me a chance
. “Mum, I’m going to say a name to you, and I want you to tell me what you know about him. Okay?”
“What? Why?”
“Just go along with it, please.”
“You’re behaving mysteriously.”
“Anton Fournier. Mum, who is Anton Fournier?”
There was a half second’s pause before she spoke. “I’ve never heard that name,” she said, but I knew she was lying. I’d heard the fear and anxiety in the pause. It came down the line as clear as a bell, because my mother was highly practiced in conveying her anxiety to me. I
had
heard it.
“Come on, Mum, who is he? Why does he hate us?”
“Hate us? What are you talking about? I told you, I don’t know who he is. Has he contacted you? You should call the police if he’s threatened you.”
I stopped, turned in a circle, my long shadow at my feet. The trees in the breeze. Mum would never,
never
tell me, especially not if I bullied her. And if she got to Dad before I did, he’d never tell me either: he was a servant to her anxiety as much as I was. But she knew who Anton was—I was certain of it. I’d bet all I owned (which admittedly wasn’t much) that she was the reason Anton Fournier had snarled at me as though I were some kind of fiend.
“Lauren?”
“Forget it, Mum,” I said.
“But is he—”
“I said forget it. Tell Dad I love him. Talk soon.” I ended the call and slid my phone back in my pocket. I longed to go back to Anton’s house, calm him down, get him to talk to me. What on earth had my mother done to him?
But I couldn’t go back there. I couldn’t call him. So, my only option was to write him a letter. I hurried home.
Dear Anton,
I know this letter will be unwelcome, but please read it. I don’t know why you are angry with my family, but I do know that my mother can be overprotective and interfering, and perhaps she is the one who has upset you. For my part, I am four years younger than Adam, and was little more than a child at the time you and Adam were friends, so I promise you I’ve never done anything to hurt you, or to hurt Adam, of course. He was my brother and I really loved him.
I stopped writing, put down the pen on the kitchen bench.
I really loved him
. It was too wishy-washy. Anybody could say they “really loved” somebody. It didn’t capture anything: the way my love for my brother existed in every pore of my skin, every strand of my DNA. I picked up my pen again, scribbled out the last line and started a new paragraph.
I was born in love with Adam: he was there before me, like my parents. But unlike my parents, he never nagged me to brush my teeth or told me I was getting too rowdy or that I should sit still because I was giving my mother a headache. Adam was on my side. Even though he was a boy and even though he was older, he never brushed me off or called me a brat or a dumb little girl. Granted, he never hit the school bully for me either. You know how skinny he was—he probably needed somebody to protect him from bullies. But he was protective of me in other ways. He was protective of my heart, of my ego. He was unfailingly kind to me when we were children, in a way I realize now was well out of the ordinary for a young boy.
I have all these memories that bubble to the surface when I think about Adam. We grew up on a big rambling property twenty kilometers outside of Hobart, and much of our playtime was spent imagining we were other people. One summer, we became obsessed with playing a game we set at a strict boys’ boarding school: St. Smithereens Boys School. He played the part of the clever senior, always outwitting the wretched teachers; I played the part of the wide-eyed junior, an accomplice to his brilliant plans who spent most of the game saying, “You are the smartest boy I know.” I worshipped him, in the game and out of it.
I put the pen down again, slumped forwards on the bench, and let myself cry. I would come back to the letter later, when I didn’t feel
so raw. In the meantime, I would ask around about Anton Fournier. It was a small town: somebody must know something.
* * *
I knocked on Mrs. Tait’s door at ten the next morning, my day off, and she answered it with a smile. “Hello, dear.”
“Would you like to come over for a cuppa?” I asked.
“Why don’t you come in here? I have a lovely new teapot.”
“I’d love that.” Secretly, I was relieved. There wasn’t much room at my place, and I could smell something wonderful baking in Lizzie’s house.
“Come on in, then. I’ve just made a batch of scones for the library fund-raising committee. We can steal a couple for ourselves.”
Sitting in Lizzie’s sunny kitchen drinking hot tea and eating fresh scones with jam and butter was a lovely way to spend my morning off. I had chores to do—grocery shopping, cleaning my bathroom—but they could wait. We chatted for ages about family, life, work, movies (it turned out Lizzie was a crime-thriller film buff), and then I finally asked what I’d been intending to ask all along.
“Lizzie, do you know of somebody named Anton Fournier who lives up on Fallview Road?”
“Is that the rather handsome fellow who runs a record company?”
“He’s handsome, yes. I don’t know what he does for a living.”
“It’s the big timber-and-glass mansion.”
“That’s him.”
“I don’t know much, I’m sorry. Just that he travels a lot for work, overseas and so on. He keeps to himself.”
“He’s the man in the photo. With Adam. The one I showed you.”
“Is he? Is he indeed? Yes, now I think of it, it
is
him. I didn’t recognize him in the picture with all that long hair. He’s filled out a bit.”
“I suppose he was only a teenager back then.”
“So, he knew your brother?”
“The most curious thing: I went to see him, to ask him what he remembered about Adam. He got really angry at me and told me he wanted nothing to do with me or my family.”
Lizzie tipped the teapot up to her cup again, but only a trickle came out. “Did he now? There’s a mystery for you.”
“Something happened back then. I don’t know what. Can you think of anyone in town who might know some more about him?”
“I think he has a young fellow who stays there with him, some of the time or all of the time, I’m not sure. He looks after the house and the dogs when Anton goes away. Can’t recall his name, but Penny might know. But apart from that, I can’t help.”
“No wife I could speak to? Children at the local school?”
“Not that I know of, dear. Sorry to be so useless.”
I beamed. “You’re not useless. You’re wonderful. Shall I refill the pot?”
“That would be lovely.”
* * *
Penny had nothing either.
“I’ve seen the guy Mrs. Tait mentioned,” she said to me, after hearing the whole story. “I remember chatting to him outside the bakery one day when he was walking the dogs. Two whippets, isn’t it? He mentioned Anton being away in Hong Kong. I think he said his name was Peter, or perhaps Patrick. Started with P. Anton has been in here once or twice, but my impression was that coffee isn’t his thing. He was after vegan food and herbal tea.”
“But he’s a record executive or something?”
“I couldn’t say. Travels a lot. Not often around in town and very private when he is, I imagine. You could try Amelia at the health-food shop; there’s a good chance he’s more frequent there.”
“Thanks. Thanks, I might do that.” I tied on my apron and got to work. I was starting to understand that asking about Anton Fournier wasn’t going to achieve much. Whether or not he was a record executive who went to health-food shops, whether or not he owned whippets, or had a dogsitter named Peter or Patrick—none of these things told me why he’d had such a violent reaction to my presence. All I could do was keep working on my letter and try to put it out of my mind.
“Hey, I’m driving down to Sydney on Monday morning,” Penny said.
“You want me to cover your shift?”
“No, Eleanor’s going to do it. I wanted to know if you want to come for the drive. I’ve got to see a solicitor in the city. You could go shopping. It’s a long way by myself, and I’d be grateful for the company.”
An idea glimmered, driving thoughts of Anton Fournier out of my head temporarily. “Will we be anywhere near a library?”
“A library? Evergreen Falls has a library.”
“I want a big library.”
“There are libraries at the university.”
“Then I’ll definitely come.”
When Adam left to take the job in the Blue Mountains—I presume that’s when he met you—I was bereft. I was a spotty teenager, very awkward, and he was always so smooth and so sure of himself. He was a beautiful boy, wasn’t he? I look back at pictures of him and he has a glow about him, a softness about his face. I have a photograph of the two of you, all long hair and faraway looks, up on the viewing platform above the Falls. He looks happy, content. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to know what he was doing at that time in his life, when he was far away from us. He never let go of the idea that he might go back one day, though that wasn’t to be.
I wish I could say Adam was always lovely, patient, kind, and gorgeous, as he had been as a boy and then in his young adulthood when you knew him. But unfortunately, it wouldn’t be true. The illness took such a toll on him, it’s impossible for you to imagine. He was at times bloated and red-faced, at other times bony and pale. The light left his eyes around his twenty-second birthday, with his first bout of cancer caused by the anti-rejection drugs. Maybe up until that point he’d thought one day he’d get better, but after that, he grew negative and—
I stopped for a moment. I knew what I had to write. Frightened. He grew frightened. I tapped my pen on the desk, deciding that only brutal honesty would win Anton Fournier over, and continued.
—frightened. His fear was one of the worst aspects of his condition. We were all afraid, too, of course we were. We were afraid for our hearts, afraid of the empty future without him, afraid of how much it was going to hurt when he died. But his fear was far more primal. He looked death in the face every day. Every single day. The rest of us think about death every now and again, and it gives us a chill for a few moments and then we’re off about our lives, making ourselves busy. But Adam lay there every day and breathed every breath alongside that shadow, and I’d be lying if I said he eventually got used to it or made his peace. He didn’t. There wasn’t any peace. That made him a little cruel, and very demanding. That made the corners of his mouth turn down perpetually, creating permanent creases in his beautiful face—that face that had never even seen a pimple—and it made him sometimes say or do hurtful things.
I took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of my nose as some of the memories came back to me. Adam’s voice, shrill with pain,
telling Mum she’d ruined his life, telling Dad he was a bumbling oaf, telling me I was a stupid little girl who knew nothing about the world. I suppose, at least, the last accusation was true. I didn’t write any of this down. It was too private.
Through it all, I loved him still. I loved him and wished and hoped for improvements. Not for recovery, because we all knew that this was a train that had only one destination. But I wished for happiness for him, and sometimes he had it. Sometimes in a gentle mood we would laugh and talk as we had as children. We’d reminisce about St. Smithereens or about television shows we’d watched together like
Monkey
and
Doctor Who.
He was still in there, my lovely brother. When I got a chance to see that side of him and spend time with him, I felt like the happiest girl alive.
Anton, one thing I know about Adam is that Evergreen Falls is the last place he was happy. When I asked him about why, he would just say because it was beautiful and he had good friends there. Is that true? Or was there more? Drew told me about the mad summer you all had. I would love to know more. I would love to hear everything you can remember about Adam, because memories are all I have now that he is gone. I’ll write my phone number and address below if you change your mind.
Kind regards,
Lauren Beck
I wrote my phone number, my address and the address of the café, and then I folded the letter, went to Lizzie’s for an envelope and stamp, and walked to the corner to post it. Once it had slid into the postbox, there was nothing more I could do, so I vowed to put my own family mystery out of my mind.
I had a mystery from the 1920s still to solve.
* * *
The vast university library I walked into on Monday morning was nothing like the small community library where I used to find books for Adam. Nor would I have to return home to wash my hands with antibacterial gel and spray the books with disinfectant, causing Adam to curl his lip when I handed them to him. “Did you get these from the library or the hospital?” he would say. And I’d say, “You’re welcome,” and he’d crack a little smile and start reading.
I let the memories flow through me and turned back to the task at hand, which was trying to figure out the state-of-the-art software with which I had to try to find books. Keyword search? That might be the one.