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When we met, Jude and I had marveled at the symmetry of our ages. Written down in my diary—24 42—they looked like a palindrome or a postcode from an outer Sydney suburb. It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me.
I had gone down south on a holiday with my mother that summer to Sailors Beach. A watery place, surrounded by the bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, a place we had not visited since I was a child. It would be just the two of us again, for the first time since my younger brother was born. Our family an ever-tangling web and men the loose threads left hanging, but not our Henry, not yet. Man of the house, we teased, though he was still a boy then, only twelve. He belonged to us except for the month of January, gone fishing with his father up north, and we hoped he would return uncorrupted by the silent, absent ways of all the other men who passed in and out of our lives.
Back then, my mother had only recently moved to her house in the mountains, and though she often said she was used to life without a man around—preferred it, even—being at home without a child was something else, and I think she did not like the idea of spending weeks in the new place alone. She was repainting, she’d told me when she called a few weeks before the New Year, and the fumes were giving her a headache. Plus, there was something about the way the tree branches scraped at the windows in the hot breeze. The smell of paint, the heat—it played tricks on her mind. She had seen the garden hose coiled on the concrete back steps take the shape of a brown snake baking in the sun, right beside her boots.
Though my mother is older now and has settled, she has always had a tendency to talk of houses the way other people talk about lovers: This is it this time, I’ve found the one, I can feel it. Her wandering eye for a Victorian terrace, or an aging Australian bungalow built in the California style. All her new beginnings took the shape of freshly painted walls, a roof under which nothing bad had ever happened. No wine spilled on the carpet, no fist-shaped hole through the drywall. I think she liked the work of it—ripping up a garden gone to seed, peeling back flaking wallpaper, stripping the paint from the floors to reveal a dusty golden pine or wide boards of solid Tasmanian oak. The strength it takes to bring an old house back from the brink of ruin, bringing in the light, the air. Water and seeds out for the birds. That kind of work, she said, it makes you believe that change is possible. You can see the difference you made, and all for the better too.
That was my mother—dreaming in blueprints, ever since I was conceived beneath the bare wooden bones of an unfinished house on a construction site in suburban Melbourne where my father worked as a laborer during the day and slept sometimes, after hours. She was in her last year of art school then and living in her childhood home, so my parents made love in sawdust, a blue tarpaulin slapping against the empty frame in the winter wind that blew in sharp off the Tasman Sea, moon shining through the crossbeams. Brushing sawdust from their hair. My parents separated sometime between my third and fourth birthday—young enough for me to have few memories of them together, but I had my mother’s stories, repeated over the years until they gained the quality of myth.
