Listen (44 page)

Authors: Kate Veitch

Tags: #Fiction, #General

When they were all quiet, Robert gestured for his mother to come towards them. She paused a couple of metres away and he said in a ringing voice, ‘Mother, we’d like to sing you a Christmas carol.’

‘Oh!’ cried Rose, lit by a sudden flash of memory, and her hands flew to her face.

Robert turned slightly to count the others in. ‘One, two, three!’

‘O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant
,

O come ye, O come ye to Be-ethlehem.’

Vesna joined in, hitting the high note in a voice of real loveliness, her daughters quickly following:

‘Come and behold him, born the king of angels…’

And then the others were all singing, too, even Alex, the garden full of swelling
O come let us adore him
s, and Alex even tried to start the second verse but not many people could remember the words to that one and besides, a couple of voices were wobbling now. Tears were trickling down Rose’s face; she hadn’t even tried to sing, she was just smiling hugely and crying and saying, ‘Oh… oh…’, again and again.

‘Welcome back, Mother,’ said Robert, stepping forward and folding her in a close embrace. The other three surrounded her then, all reaching to stroke her shoulder or hug her, saying, ‘Welcome back’, and, ‘Merry Christmas, Rose’.

‘And you’ll have noticed,’ said Robert, stepping back at last, ‘That there’s no Christmas tree here?’

‘Yes?’

‘So we don’t want to hear any rubbish about you going off to get some lights for it, all right?’

‘All right. Yes, all right,’ Rose said, laughing shakily through the tears. Someone handed her a serviette and she blew her nose and mopped at her eyes. ‘Oh, look at me. You’ve made a complete mess of me, you rotten kids!’

‘Well,
of course
we have!’ said Meredith, her hands on her hips. ‘That’s the whole
point
, isn’t it?’

The little knot broke up. Alexa and Bianca came running in to hug their father, one on either side. Watching them, Olivia thought,
There’s something different about Uncle Robert.
He looked bigger
somehow: not like he’d put on weight, quite the opposite, more like he’d taken up swimming maybe. That was it, that open swimmer’s chest, like Uncle James, noticeable even though he was bending a little to return his daughters’ hugs. And he just seemed… less
fussy
, somehow. More relaxed, like her own dad. And at that thought, a pang of missing her father tightened her throat again, and she thought,
I’ll email him as soon as I get home.

As soon as she had fed her other animals and settled the dogs, Olivia went into her bedroom and opened her elegant white laptop. Instantly it sprang to life, displaying her latest screensaver: a photo of Congo with his basenji girlfriend, taken on a recent visit to Janine Endicott’s yabby farm.

How Olivia loved her new computer. She had never been much of a one for writing before, not beyond schoolwork, but since Silver had given her this laptop she had been writing more and more. All sorts of things, just as they occurred to her, not trying to keep them in order. It was all too confusing for that, everything that had happened. But as she wrote, it started to seem a bit
less
confusing. That was good.

She opened up her email program and popped Angus’s address in the ‘To’ space.

Hi Dad -

Merry Christmas Eve! We just got home from Grandpa’s. This was the McDonald family get-together that I told you about for my grandmother. I really wish you could meet her. Maybe next time. She looks incredibly like Mum, except older of course. Well, not surprising, she is her mother! She doesn’t seem much like a grandma – I mean that in a nice way! She asked me to call her Rose. Mum and everyone call her Rose too, except Uncle Robert, he calls her Mother, you know how he is. I like her, she seems really sensible. Her husband is here too, he’s really nice and his daughter is FANTASTIC, her name’s Jacinta and she is 16. You know how Laurence is taking a year off before he starts at RMIT? Well, Jacinta’s dad has offered him a job with his company in England and Laurence can work there and stay at their place and everything, and travel in Europe and stuff while he’s there too. He is really excited. I think he really, REALLY likes Jacinta too. I’m glad she’s so nice.

Mum told everyone about going to Scotland next year, and you and Marion coming to live here. So now it’s official! Every single adult except Grandpa came up to me kind of privately afterwards and asked me how I felt about having a new baby brother or sister. Oh, Silver didn’t ask either, she is pretty cool and I guess she already knows how I feel! I told them all I’m really happy about it and I also said that I really like Marion and they would too. They all looked pleased, it was good. Auntie Meredith gave me a big hug and said how lovely it will be to have a new baby in the family. She got a bit sooky, you know how she is. But nice. Her living at Grandpa’s house is working out really well.

Well, I hope you have an excellent Christmas Day and get lots of presents! Please say hello to Marion for me and wish her Merry Christmas too. See you both soon. Have a good time there in Paradise (joke - because it’s Eden, right?)

Love you, Dad
Liv (Olivia) xxxx

She clicked on
Send
and the message disappeared, swirled away into cyberspace. Olivia exited her email and opened a new document. She wrote about the evening just past, and Jacinta meeting Fleur.
About the incredible, heady feeling of being someone who had
two
friends, and the relief, the
joy
as those two friends met and liked each other, too.

It was late by the time she finished. Now she saved the document one last time, and instructed the computer to
sleep
and closed its lid. The soft round light on the front of the sleek white box glowed dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter. As she settled down to sleep she smiled, feeling that it was watching over her. It would breathe in and out with her through the night, patiently waiting until she was ready to tell it more; to open the lid again on her magic box of words.

In the guest room of his old mate Dave’s house in Eden, Angus’s laptop registered the newly arrived email, but he’d know nothing of it till next day. He was lying on the bed with Marion; they had just made love. She had gone to bed not long after dinner and Angus had come to join her, quietly nestling against her back and bottom. He stroked her; he lifted her long soft cotton nightie, and one thing led to another. Now they were both drifting contentedly towards sleep. She lifted his hand from where it lay on her hip and snuggled it to the mound of her belly, between navel and pubic hair. Below his hand, their baby, who weighed a little over two pounds now and was six months and millions of cells on from that initial chance meeting of egg and sperm, flexed and stretched its little body against the elastic confines of Marion’s uterus, still perfectly comfortable in its watery home.

The baby was a little boy, but his parents didn’t know that, having elected through all the various tests and procedures not to be informed of its sex. Embedded in his genes were those for his mother’s height, and her stoicism, but not her auburn hair, and in there too was his father’s easygoing nature and three unusually long middle toes. This baby was already encoded for a healthy
body and a personality inclined to cheerfulness and contentment; destined not for great things, but for good ones. But no one knew that yet. His parents talked about him, and dreamed, but no one knew him at all.

Acknowledgements

The first draft of this novel was written while I was living in Banjar Sala in the village of Pejeng, near Ubud, in Bali. To all the people there who looked after me so well and so kindly, my thanks, affection and respect.

Various friends visited me over those months, and to each of them my gratitude for their company and encouragement, especially to my first reader and first editor Phillip Frazer.

My agent, Fiona Inglis, plucked the manuscript out of nowhere, astonished me with an email that capped off a remarkable fiftieth birthday, and proceeded to shepherd the novel on its way with assurance and aplomb.

Everyone in the Penguin colony has made me most welcome, none more so than publisher Kirsten Abbott and editor Belinda Byrne, both women of charm, wit, and great professional skill. Designer Marina Messiha produced a book that is elegant beyond my dreams or expectations.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you!