They all laughed, but there was a serious undertone. I could sympathize. There was no mistaking the class system here, or the chasm between those with plenty and those with little. I was always much more aware of it here than I ever was in Australia. It had been a hot topic during my visit to Aidan’s parents in Ireland too. His father held very strong opinions about class divisions. He had strong opinions about everything. He’d made it clear to me that the sooner Australia voted to become a republic, the better. I didn’t get much of a word in, but by the time Aidan and I left, I knew enough to head up my own republican movement.
The tutors were still arguing. “It comes down to education, not money, in the end, doesn’t it?” Peggy said, earnestly. “And that’s why Lucas does what he does here. He’s trying to even it up. Give us the same opportunities as rich kids, a rent-free place to live and study, a good job—”
“Fattening food,” Mark said, reaching for a croissant.
The other three left soon after. It was just Harry and me in the kitchen together. I gave up on my formal interview questions. “Do you know what you’ll do after you’ve finished living here?”
He took a sip of his coffee. “A year ago, I’d have said I’d keep studying. I wanted to change the world. Cure cancer. But not anymore. I’m starting to think I should go where the money is. I’m tutoring for one family at the moment—all four of us are—that’s rich from drug money. Serious drug money.” He grinned. “Not street drugs. Pharmaceutical money. I met the father the other night for the first time. When he heard I was a science PhD, he gave me his card, told me to get in touch with him as soon as I’d graduated and he’d have a job for me.” He reached into his pocket and passed me a card. “Look at this. It’s unbelievable. He’s got six different contact numbers.”
I wasn’t looking at the business card. I was looking at Harry’s watch. It was an enormous Rolex. He noticed and pushed his sleeve back even farther. To show it, not hide it.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” he said with a grin. “Have a guess how much it’s worth? Ten thousand pounds. For a watch. It’s obscene. That’s a year’s salary. Now, guess how much I got it for.”
I didn’t answer.
“Twenty pounds!” He laughed. “It’s a knockoff, of course. Darin’s got one too. We bought them at Camden Market. But it tells the time and it fools enough people to make it fun.” He looked at it again. “Speaking of which, time I left too. Thanks for breakfast. Hope I’ve been a help; have I?”
I glanced down. The page was blank. “A big help, thanks,” I said.
A
n e-mail from Australia was waiting for me when I logged on to my computer the following morning. It was from a features writer at one of Australia’s bestselling women’s magazines.
Dear Ella,
I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear your mother, Merry, is going to be the focus of a six-page feature in our autumn issue. We can’t wait to spend time with her and we know our readers will love hearing all about her amazing life and path to success too! As well as Merry and her husband, we’ll be interviewing her nearest and dearest, and as her eldest daughter, that of course includes you!
We’ve already taken some fantastic photos of Merry and Jess together on set, and we’d love to photograph you all together. We will of course cover your costs to bring you to Melbourne. Will you please let us know some dates that might suit?
Thanks and looking forward to chatting soon!
I deleted it.
Then I rescued it. Then I deleted it again.
It wasn’t Mum’s fault. Mum could be self-absorbed and scatty and distracted and unthinking, but she wouldn’t have done this to me a second time, surely?
I found the e-mail again and wrote back briefly, saying I was sorry but I was overseas so would be unable to take part. I hesitated, then sent another e-mail, to Mum’s personal e-mail address. I should have let her and Walter know I was in London before now.
Mum, just a quick note to let you know I’m not in Margaret River anymore. I’ve decided to spend some time in London. I’m staying at Lucas’s. I’m sorry I won’t be able to take part in the magazine article. I hope it goes well.
Love to you and Walter,
Ella xx
I’d been asked to be part of one of Mum’s publicity campaigns before. It was six months after Felix had died. I’d left Canberra and was working as a waitress in Melbourne. I’d been behind the front desk of a very busy pizza restaurant in St. Kilda when Mum and Walter came in.
It wasn’t a surprise to see them. They’d dropped in several times before, each time saying they happened to be passing by. They greeted me with a hug. I hugged them back. They asked how I was. I asked how they were. Then I waited. I could tell they were there for a specific reason. It was before the lunchtime rush. I had a few minutes to talk. We took a seat at one of the empty tables.
Walter spoke first. “Ella, we’ve had some exciting news.”
I listened as he told me the cable network had offered
MerryMakers
another series.
“That’s great. Congratulations to you both.”
“Not just us. Jess too.”
I didn’t answer. I waited, as they glanced at each other. Then Walter spoke again.
“Ella, there’s a place on the show for you too, if you’d like to join us. We’d like you to join us.”
Mum spoke in a rush. “The network loves the family aspect of it. The joking between Jess and me. You know, the way she comes into the kitchen while I’m cooking and steals bits of food and—”
“It’s authentic family life,” Walter said. “The viewers feel like they are there in the kitchen with Meredith and Jess.”
I listened. I sat and I listened.
Mum repeated Walter’s offer. “We mean it, Ella. We’d love you to be part of it. We can write you in like this.” She clicked her fingers.
“How would you introduce me?”
“As my daughter, of course. My eldest daughter.”
“And you’d want me to joke and stick my finger into the cake batter, and tease Jess, and it would be like a normal mum and her daughters, having lots of fun in the kitchen together?”
Walter beamed. “Exactly!”
“Messing and joking around, lots of laughs and cooking, all for a national TV audience?”
“International! More than two million and growing every week,” Walter said, smiling proudly.
“And could I say during one of the shows, just casually bring it in, that I used to be married, that I used to have a baby son, but one afternoon Jess was babysitting and she chose to talk to her latest boyfriend on the phone instead of look after my son, and because of that—”
Mum interrupted. “Ella, please—”
“Would you like me to cry on-camera? Would that be great for your ratings?”
Walter stepped in. “Ella, your mother is only thinking of you, wanting to help—”
“My mother is thinking of her show and of Jess, Walter, not me.”
“Ella, please.” Mum, again. Her eyes filled with tears. “Darling, please. I loved Felix too. He was my grandson. You’re not the only one who—”
I felt guilty. I apologized. But there was more to come. Walter glanced at my mother, put his hand on her arm and then spoke to me again, his voice even lower.
“Ella, I am sorry, this might not be the best time, but we need to ask you something else. The network publicity department has been in touch. You know they sent you some flowers, when . . . when it first happened.”
There had been more than forty wreaths and bouquets sent to our Canberra apartment. I had read all the cards at the time, but I couldn’t remember now who they were from.
Walter continued. “They’ve asked if Meredith will talk publicly about it. It would be an exclusive interview. With the most-watched current affairs show in Australia.”
Mum spoke again, still tearful. “They said that so many other women would be able to relate, Ella. They said they want me to be able to show that being a celebrity doesn’t make you immune to heartbreak, that there is a way forward after a family tragedy like ours, that we just need to . . .”
She kept talking but I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t believe someone had asked her if they could use Felix’s death to promote a comedy TV cooking show.
I finally interrupted. It was hard to keep my voice level. “No, I don’t think so, Mum. Could you both excuse me now? This is our busy time.” I stood up.
Mum tried again. “Ella, please, don’t go yet. Let us help you. Don’t shut us out too.”
“Too?”
Another glance passed between her and Walter.
Mum put her hand on my arm. “We spoke to Aidan again last night. He told us you still won’t answer his calls or his e-mail. Darling, please talk to him. We need to stay close as a family at a time like this. Get through it together by helping each other, not hurting each other.”
“Did you think of that line yourself or did the publicity department write it for you?”
This time Walter gasped. I said good-bye, turned and walked away, into the kitchen. I didn’t come out again until I was sure they’d left. I worked my shift, stayed an extra hour inventing more work and then went back to my apartment. It was only when I was in my room, the windows shut tightly and music playing loud enough to mask any noise, that I cried and cried.
I cried for Felix, as ever. But I cried for myself too. For the self that had died when Felix died. I hated what I’d said to Mum and Walter. Oh, I felt justified, angry even. What they had proposed had been so clumsy, so unfeeling. But in my heart I understood what they had been trying to do. Stay connected with me. Help me move on in the only way they could think of. I didn’t regret saying no to them. Of course I had to say no. But I hated the way I’d done it. I wasn’t that mean person, saying hurtful things, hitting out at people, walking away from people, was I? I’d never been like this. Yes, Jess had driven me crazy over the years, Mum had exasperated me, Walter had, well, Walter had been Walter, but I had been able to laugh about it, hadn’t I? Joked with Charlie? Let Aidan tease me about my reactions to my family?
Now, though, it was like I was outside myself, saying cruel things, deliberately. It felt like it was beyond my control.
Mum rang me the next day. She apologized again. I listened, pressing my nails into my palms. I murmured that it was fine, even though I was lying. Then she hesitated and I knew she was about to mention Aidan or Jess again.
“Ella, please, can’t you—”
“Mum, I’m sorry. No.”
She begged me again. I said no again. Eventually, she lost patience. I heard it in her voice. “What if it had been Charlie babysitting that day? Would you have been like this with him?”
“If it had been Charlie babysitting that day, it wouldn’t have happened.”
There it was, said out loud, the words that had gone unspoken until now.
“Ella, we’re a family. We need to—”
Stick together? Why? I had had my own family. Now I had nothing. There was no rule that said families stayed together. I was proof of that.
I knew she was trying, as Walter tried when he rang the next day to plead Jess’s case again. “She is devastated too, Ella. She cries all day and all night. You must talk to her.” But I couldn’t do what they wanted. I couldn’t make things better for her. She had done what she had done and now we all had to live with the consequences. Jess. Aidan. Me. I couldn’t go back in time. I couldn’t fix the moment I most wanted to change in my life too.
Jess wrote to me then. I only got halfway through her letter.
Ella, I’m so so so so so sorry. I can’t sleep for the guilt, I haven’t been able to learn my lines for the new play I’m doing, or remember my steps. I think about it all the time—
Her lines. Her steps. She was back on the stage, and I could barely dress myself.
That same night I dreamed Jess, not Mum and Walter, came into the restaurant. She was happy, laughing, dressed in a stage costume, her face made up, her curls bouncing. She’d come to tell me she’d written a musical about Felix, that she was going to star in it, that she wanted me to come to the premiere, to watch her sing and dance her way through Felix’s life story. In the dream, I smiled at her, said it sounded lovely, that I couldn’t wait to see it. And then I took up a knife from the kitchen bench and I stabbed her. In the heart. It happened in slow motion, and she died in front of me, in theatrical fashion, like a victim in a silent movie, mouth open, eyes wide in shock and pain, before slowly, gracefully collapsing into a bloodied heap at my feet.
I woke up at two thirty a.m. In those first moments between the dream and the real world taking over, I felt a strange, comforting calm. Jess was dead. Good. Then reality rushed in. No, Jess wasn’t dead. Felix was dead. I remembered my dream and became even more upset. My wanting to kill Jess, wanting her to feel terrible pain, was dangerous and sad and I had to stop those thoughts. It was then that I knew I had to leave Melbourne. I had to get as far away from my family as I could. I had to try to outrun the pain and the anger. I got up, turned on my laptop and opened a bottle of wine.
I looked up bus timetables. Job agencies. Houses to rent. House-sitting Web sites. I took note after note. I saw job vacancies for waitresses, fruit pickers, vineyard workers, all over Australia. I worked in a kind of mania. This type of work will help me, I remember thinking as I took a sip of the wine. The more I drank, the less pain I felt.
I finished the first bottle and opened another one. I felt good. I felt great. Everything was going to be okay! My brain felt quiet, at peace, cushioned, the spikes of grief flattened. I had six glasses of wine, more than I’d had since Felix died. More than I’d had in years. I don’t remember going to bed. I woke up again at five a.m., nauseous and disorientated. I couldn’t work out where I was. I think I was still drunk. And there, in my dark room, lying in my bed, there was a moment—just a moment, but it felt like the longest moment of my life—when I couldn’t remember what Felix looked like. I was lying there, wanting to think about him, and I couldn’t picture him.
I panicked. I got up and found all the photos I had of him. I stared at each of them in turn, until his face, his beautiful, smiling, cheeky face, was imprinted on my mind again. One photograph in particular stayed with me, one I’d taken of him aged thirteen months, first thing in the morning, clambering out of his cot, one leg over the rail, both hands reaching out, ready to get going, wanting the day to start now, quickly, come on! It summed him up, his zest for life, the energy he’d had—
At the funeral, the priest had spoken of Felix’s energy and of our sorrow.
When God takes a child, we are all forced to reexamine our lives. . . .
I didn’t hear any of it at the time. One night, quite late, a week after I had left Canberra, I rang the priest and asked him to tell me what he had said. I needed to know it wasn’t a generic speech. That he didn’t have stock words of consolation. That Felix had mattered.
Mum rang me the next day. The priest had rung her, worried about my mental health.
I told her what I had told him. I needed to know what he’d said about Felix.
“Couldn’t you have asked me?”
“I needed to hear it from him.”
“Ella, would you like to come and stay with us for a while?”
“No.” I tried to be nicer about it. “No, thank you.”
The next day, Charlie e-mailed and asked me if I wanted to come and stay with him. I pictured being there in Boston, with Charlie and Lucy and their four happy, healthy, living, breathing children. Tim, the youngest, was just a year older than Felix would have been.
I rang rather than e-mailed. “Charlie, I’m sorry. I know you mean well—”
“But you can’t.” A long pause. “I understand.”
I thought about suicide. Several times. What was the point of going on? What kind of life was this? But I couldn’t go through with it. Not because of me, or my family, but for Felix’s sake. I didn’t want him—wherever he was, in heaven, in the galaxy somewhere—to need me, to be looking for me and me not be there for him. It made no sense, I know. I knew he wasn’t coming back. I knew he was dead. The knowledge of it was like a piece of glass in my heart, throbbing every second, every minute of the day. But while I was alive, I could remember him being alive and that was the only thing, in the early months, that stopped me.
I kept moving instead. From the moment I got up until it was time for bed, I made myself stay busy. I changed cities. I changed careers. How could I be an editor anymore? How could I spend hours each day on my own in a quiet room, carefully going through lines of words on a page or on a screen, moving phrases around, asking questions, querying facts, when that was already what I was doing every single minute of every day, going over and over an afternoon in a Canberra park, wanting to change every single thing about—