This Picture of You Read online

  Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. Some characters and places are inspired by real people and events, but the incidents described in the book are the product of imagination.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Sarah Hopkins 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:  (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:   [email protected]

  Web:   www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 940 6

  eISBN 978 1 74343 700 1

  Quoted material from WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT

  by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury

  Text © 1989 Michael Rosen

  Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Australia

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Four

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the author

  Part

  One

  Chapter 1

  From his seat at the sunroom window, Martin watched Maggie walk from the house through the open gate that never shut: barefoot and straight-backed, a swimmer’s shoulders. He watched as she crossed the street and stepped up to the footpath and as she walked over the grass, where her silhouette met the sea, still grey beneath a rising orange sun. And, finally, when she stepped over the rocks down to the ocean pool—her white towel tucked around the waist of her swimsuit, goggles and cap in hand—he edged forwards in his seat to keep her in view for as long as he could.

  The rhythm of it . . . his Maggie. She stepped in time with her heartbeat, always had.

  And here in this place that was their home she formed part of the landscape, like the black cockatoos that mobbed the sky, back again, yellow-tailed and screeching for the highest branch of the banksias. Maggie had wished for birds with a more beautiful song. Finnegan said they sounded like chimpanzees. But if the cockatoos were to be likened to another creature, Martin thought as he watched the smaller birds deserting the low-lying bush, it must be to a bat. The wide, steady span of their wing: the black bats of day.

  The other weekend when he had slept over, Finnegan had counted the birds in the trees: ‘Twelve plus nine cocka-monkeys.’ He liked the yellow spots on their cheeks but thought that they were bullies. ‘They push out the rosellas,’ he said, creases denting his little forehead. But Martin shook his head. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe the rosellas just choose to leave.’

  It was Sunday. Slowly the list formed; the family was coming at midday. Maggie would prepare the paprikash before going to the store for flowers. While she was gone he would sweep the path and light the barbecue so she could char the peppers. And for now he would make them tea and toast.

  When she returned from her swim, he was standing at the fridge with a jar of chutney in his hand. She surprised him there at the door, and when he looked back to the jar it was just a dark brown jelly in cold glass without a label, like it was playing a trick on him. He shook his head and put it back.

  ‘The strangest thing . . .’ he said.

  ‘What, darling?’ The purple indentations of goggle marks were still around her eyes.

  He smiled then. ‘Nothing. How was the water?’

  ‘Like ice.’

  ‘And they’re coming at midday?’

  ‘Yes, midday.’

  He picked up the paper. On seeing the date, and remembering the occasion, his eyes brightened. ‘It is our anniversary,’ he said. ‘Happy anniversary, my girl.’ They had never married, but it was thirty-seven years since the day she knocked on the door to his loft. There had been years when it went by unacknowledged, and then years of gifts and surprise dinners, and many, like today, somewhere in between.

  ‘The look on your face when you stepped into the garden,’ he said. The place he spoke of was a garden between the tenements in New York, which he had taken her to on the day they met. ‘I can remember it, you know.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Yes, but it is strange lately; it’s as though the day were creeping back to me.’

  ‘Why strange? What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s on my mind, that’s all—strange in that the memory’s so clear. The other night I dreamt of it. I think it’s one of those recurring ones; I think that’s what’s happening.’

  Maggie looked perplexed, but didn’t press it, nor did Martin want her to. What he didn’t try to explain to her was that in recalling the memory he was getting lost in it somehow, that when he returned to the here and now, the light had changed, dimmed—as though he had left the room for just a moment and someone had come in and messed it all up. At the very least, the ground was shifting. If it reminded him of anything in his past, it was the feeling one had at the end of an acid trip, the unsettling sense of not knowing exactly where one had been. (Unsettling, yes, though in some respects his favourite part.)

  ‘I knew it then,’ he said. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘You knew what?’

  ‘From the look on your face: I knew you were for me.’

  She began to shake her head but smiled instead. Martin pushed himself away from the table to stand, then walked around and kissed her forehead.

  ‘Marry me, why don’t you?’

  She laughed but held on to his arm, and when he kissed her a second time she leant into it with lovely cool, salty lips.

  ‘I have an idea—an anniversary gift from you to me. Before I get old and ugly . . .’ He was asking her to paint his portrait, as he had been asking ever since her last exhibition. She went to protest but he stopped her. ‘I know, I know: when you are done with the next commission, when the students are finished for the year . . .’

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘And the garden was beautiful. The thrush had its nest in the walnut tree. We ate string beans and blackberries. And the daffodils were in bloom.’

  ‘So they were, yes. Dave barrowed the dung.’

  ‘And we spread it in the bed behind the Chinese Empress tree.’

  ‘You hiked up that little skirt and kne
lt down in the horse shit.’ He smiled. ‘It gave us the excuse to take off your clothes . . .’

  ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘It did no such thing.’ She was right. The clothes came off later. ‘Now go have a shower and get dressed.’

  ‘What time will they be here?’

  She hesitated. ‘Midday.’

  ‘Then let’s get a move on.’

  Later in the morning, Maggie returned with flowers just as the wind picked up and the sky darkened with muddy cloud. Out front, Martin was sweeping the path.

  ‘Shame,’ she called to him. ‘What happened to our perfect winter morning?’

  Martin peered out to the blurred horizon and the white-capped sea, and then turned to look behind him. ‘The rain won’t reach,’ he said, and went back to his work.

  Over the years, she had learnt not to argue about the weather with a fisherman. But looking out to the same sea, the water’s surface disappearing before her eyes in the haze of a distant downpour, she shook her head.

  ‘I’ll move the barbecue undercover, just to be safe.’

  He stopped his sweeping. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said. ‘Do the flowers, Maggie, then come back out.’

  When she did, they sat together on the front fence and watched the dimpled surface of the ocean reappear under a clearing sky. Glancing at his face in profile, tanned and weathered like the cliffs, still handsome, she leant into him before swinging her legs over to face the house.

  ‘I still think the colour is too dark.’ It was French navy with white skirting, a Californian bungalow.

  ‘I told you we never should have messed with it in the first place.’

  Remembering the peeling paint on the walls and the window frames, she laughed. ‘I don’t think judges are meant to live in rundown houses.’

  That was when he’d agreed to it, the day after his swearing in. She had wanted to do more—move the living areas to the front to capture the view, and knock down internal walls and join the open-plan movement along with the rest of the neighbours responsible for the architectural masterpieces and monstrosities now lining the South Coogee street—but Martin had put his foot down. It was still a house with separate rooms, and with rooms (even the kitchen) that had doors. Maggie could do what she wanted with her precious treasures—the coffee table inset with travertine, the carved-wood chandeliers, her vast collection of ornaments and figurines—but when it came to the rooms, Martin liked to know that behind him there was a wall and, if he so chose, he could close the door.

  As for the exterior paint, blistered and bubbling, he had been sad to see even that scraped away—though beyond ‘I like it the way it is’, he hadn’t been able to explain why. And so it was, French navy, perfect render. A mistake from the start.

  ‘God, look at those windows,’ Maggie said. But on that they had a deal. While others had darkened the glass of their front windows for the sake of privacy, Martin and Maggie were content to rely on the film of salt that coated theirs. It did the job; nature did the job, and did it for free. And the black glass, they both agreed, was an eyesore.

  The salt was thick enough for Finnegan to wet his finger with spit and play noughts and crosses with himself. And in the corner of the left pane were the pictures he had drawn: a smiley face and a tree beside a giraffe, and dwarfing them all, the plumed head of a cockatoo.

  Chapter 2

  As soon as Ethan pulled up at the house, Finn leapt from the car shouting, ‘Grandie,’ and ran to Martin, whispering feverishly in his ear.

  ‘No fishing today,’ Ethan said as he reached them, pointing more at Martin than the boy.

  Martin shrugged. ‘It isn’t the right wind for it, Finny.’

  ‘Hey, where’s my hug?’ Maggie held her arms out and Finn fell into them, tipping his cheek up to take the kiss before running inside to see if there were chips on the table.

  Laini handed Maggie a bottle of wine and wrapped her free arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Is that one of your special ones?’ Maggie held up the label and feigned delight when Laini confirmed that it was: biodynamic, preservative-free. That was all Laini could drink because the regular stuff messed up her sinuses. No one else liked it, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t have to drink it; lately Laini was polishing off the better part of it herself. And though Ethan had thought the sinus problem might have more to do with the quantity rather than the quality of the wine she drank, he never said it. A good session with a bottle (biodynamic or otherwise) did a number of things to his wife, none of which he found objectionable: not the cute honk in her laugh or the skin on her chest flushed pink. Over the last couple of months—ever since she’d started beating up on herself—it was the only thing that seemed to let her live in the moment again, and what that meant for Ethan was that later at home, after Finn was asleep, she would pull him into bed and let loose like she did in the good old days.

  He watched them walk inside, mother and wife, arm in arm, Maggie grumbling about Martin’s rock fishing to Laini’s tut-tuts.

  ‘You’re not silly enough to keep at it, are you, Martin?’ Laini said as she found a place in the fridge for her salad.

  It was a couple of months since Martin had been washed off the rocks fishing at dawn, and Maggie had been fighting with him about it ever since. The arguments were strong on both sides. He’d been fishing from the same rock for ten years and until that freak wave nothing had ever happened. But if you believed what they said about the sea levels, there were going to be more freak waves. Nature was taking its revenge et cetera, et cetera. Either way, Maggie was probably right: his father was lucky to be alive.

  Martin appeared to consider Laini’s question a minute before deciding to enter the fray. ‘I suspect the answer, Laini, is yes—yes, I am quite silly enough.’ He looked at Maggie, and as the two held eye contact throughout the long second of silence that followed, Ethan watched, waited, relieved that Martin was the first to blink, clapping his hands and declaring that it was time ‘to crack open that bottle’.

  ‘And how are you doing, Dad?’

  ‘Never better, son.’

  ‘Finn! Enough chips!’

  Then Maggie: ‘Tell me about the violin, darling.’

  ‘Violin?’ Martin asked. ‘I thought he played the piano.’

  ‘He does,’ Maggie said. ‘Violin too.’

  ‘Violin too? So how many are we up to now? Soccer, gymnastics, kung-fu . . .’

  ‘Tae kwon do,’ the boy corrected him, puffing with pride. ‘I got my blue belt. You wanna see?’

  ‘You have it here?’

  ‘No, Grandie, not the belt, the sequence. You wanna see my sequence?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ Maggie answered.

  Like her son, Laini sprang to life. ‘He needs more room.’

  Obediently they shuffled out to the living room and sat on the couches, all except Finn, who took centre stage in the middle of the room and without any further prompt leapt into warrior stance, raised his arms in the air and fanned them around in a circle and back down to his sides. Ethan sat forward in his chair. On his son’s face was the same look he wore when they wrestled: like he wanted to rip the world apart in a pretend kind of way, like a character in a video game. Ethan loved that look. When Laini talked to him about the importance of adults retaining the child within, that was how he imagined it, his own inner child. Kick-arse fearless. Game on.

  There he was, his boy, standing in front of a room and doing his thing. He punched both arms forwards and shouted ‘Keeyah!’ so loud Maggie jumped in her seat. Next came the kicks—one out to the side with either leg and then on to the trickier move: his right leg out to the front as high as his head, leading into the spin to get him to the second kick, the left leg—higher again. He usually only did the spin once, but he was on a roll with a captive crowd so he went again, with another ‘Keeyah!’

  Only this time his foot kicked the bookshelf and the ‘yah’ didn’t stop.

  ‘Yaaahhhh . . .’

  The b
oy curled into a ball on the floor, rolling back and forth. Ethan got there first, swept him up in his arms. Christ. A different look on his face, a different kind of anger—the blaming kind. He had kicked a bookshelf and he was staring at it now like it was a rabid dog that needed to be put down. Wasn’t that what Ethan had taught him when he was little, when he stubbed his toe against a wall? Bad wall. Bad table. And Finn would smack it with his chubby little hand and feel all the better for it.

  ‘We should’ve moved the shelf, buddy . . .’

  Then Laini pulled him onto her lap and made him wriggle all five toes, and when the crying trickled into a sniffle, Maggie offered her own solution. ‘How about Nana gets you some ice cream?’

  Ethan came into the kitchen as Martin was mid-sentence.

  ‘. . . soccer, violin, piano, tae kwon fucking do . . .’

  Busy scooping ice cream, they hadn’t heard him come in. ‘Oh, Martin, come on, be nice . . .’

  ‘Yeah, Dad,’ Ethan said. ‘Be nice.’

  Martin didn’t flinch. ‘I am nice; I am perfectly nice. I’m just wondering what kind of super-boy you are trying to create here.’

  Ethan shrugged. He could see his father’s point. ‘The other kids do it too. It’s different these days.’

  ‘But do you ever stop to ask why? I mean the way she runs him place to place after school now . . . Whatever happened to mucking around? Isn’t that what seven-year-old boys are best at?’

  ‘Look, it’s Laini’s thing. Don’t give her a hard time.’

  ‘It’s not our business, Martin,’ Maggie said. ‘You just miss having him back here in the afternoons.’

  ‘He misses it too! He loved fishing.’

  ‘So fish from the beach.’

  ‘I would if he wasn’t at some bloody guitar lesson.’

  ‘He doesn’t do guitar.’

  ‘No, not yet. I mean, for Christ’s sake, one instrument’s got to be enough . . .’

  Laini’s voice came from behind them. ‘We let him try everything, Martin. We don’t make him do it. If he expresses an interest we open the door, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, Laini, I didn’t mean . . .’