Broken moment

But, then it was interrupted. Sasha's phone rang, it was her father. She glanced at Elise and got to her feet, taking her wine she walked quickly back along the pier and went up steps towards the cottage. Elise looked at her own small hands with their oval nails and then at the water and the boats. The corellas and lorikeets started to settle. The light got yellower and yellower. Elise waited there, but Sasha didn't come back.

On The Peir

So that is how they ended up there. Sitting on the pier on their first night with a glass of wine each - listening to the corellas finding roosting spots and the lap lap hush of the water on the rocks and against the boats. The hollow tonging of the boats against their moorings. And it was Elise's thought as she wiped the condensation from her glass I must write about this; this is the kind of thing I need to include in my book. This exact scene. The early evening light was catching the gold out of Sasha's hair and smoothing her skin until she seemed almost perfect, sitting with her knees in a triangle looking out towards the island and the open sea. This was the way, Elise decided, she would always remember her - fix her now, this spot, this point in time, this glass of cold clear wine, this breeze. This moment.

Dreamtime horse

But, to Sasha the conversation was all promises. They had spoken mildly about the idea of moving to Elise's grandfather's waterside shack - to discover what it was they could do without the financial grief of rent. They would hire themselves out as cleaners - tie their hair up in scarves and pour buckets of bleach on expensive bathrooms. They would stay awake all night composing stories and songs. They would breathe the fresh air from the sea and their creative lives would flow from there. They would become famous - because all it took was enough passion and enough time and it would all happen from there. At least, that's how it felt for a while to Sasha, who was old enough to know that Elise's dreams were just that. And she drove off into the rain thinking of an old song she once used to sing. Something about hitching a ride on a dreamtime horse - was it? Or was that just her memory, playing tricks?

Changel

Of course Sasha wasn't magic, but she did change everything. They walked and walked through the rain that afternoon, around the back-streets of Newtown across the Uni campus into Glebe and around the foreshore then back up Glebe Point Rd. Sasha left her car where she'd pulled it up when she'd seen Elise - somewhere near Newington Rd. She put up her large green umbrella and they continued arm in arm, heads together, at talking pace. And it was one of those conversations that covered everything and nothing. From high school boys to Sasha's father, from what happened when Elise met Eddy to how the rain was also talking to them from the umbrella. When she had dropped Sasha back at her car, Elise sat for a moment and tried to recall exactly what they had said. To her, it seemed what had been woven thought their talk was their disappointment in others. One after the other friends, lovers, bands and poets had let them down. Family proved little comfort, possibilities bubbled up in the air. They wanted to write and sing, give the world the gift of themselves. How was it then, that the world was so hard and so heavy and ungrateful? How did you win against such weight? You had to do it for yourself, because you loved it and then move from there. You had to ignore societal expectations and live for your art. You had to get the hell out of here.

Guardian Angel

'Hello, I'm your guardian angel,' she said 'I'm here you grant you one wish.' Her eyes shot through with light, her skin pressed out around her lips around her eyes. She took Elise by the arm and gently squeezed it with her own and fell into step. They walked to the corner before Elise could gather up the words. Sasha was a similar height but she bent down to look up into Elise's downcast face.

'I think I have to get out of here, Sasha, I have a dead-end job, Eddy's off the Melbourne, I'm just feeling so sad about my aunt and all of that...I think I just need a change.'

'Change is what I'm good at,' she replied.

How This Changed Everything

Of course, this changed everything. Who Wilhelmina and Elise thought they were to begin with. When you have spent your life defining yourself as against that other, that thing you are not or the differences between you - without it, you lose a sense of what you are. There was some kind of balance to it – Wilhelmina eventually admitted – like being on a see-saw and supported by the wieght of the other. When they dismount and you fall with a bump onto the hard ground. It also changed the feeling of the air in the evening at exactly the time they got the news for the next few years. The way they felt about the currawong calls at sunset. It altered what they expected in the post and how rich the ten cousins would become when the wills were sorted out.

Three

Elise stood at the top of the stairs in a fury.
‘When I’m feeling this bad, you sitting there looking at me doesn’t help!’ And she threw the heavy silver boot that she’d bought at the markets at Eddy’s concerned face. ‘Go off to Melbourne! Leave now!’ She slammed the door behind her as she fled to their room, half afraid that her shot might have hit home. As Eddy stood in the dim stairwell and his expression of concern remained the same. He frowned, wondering how it was going to turn out. He had to go to Melbourne, it was a chance he couldn’t miss. The scholarship was only part of it. The faculty’s reputation and the teachers there, to be supervised by Garry Endright, it was too good. But Elise was so important, and he felt like his chest would cave in at the thought of her being sad about him leaving.
He picked up the boot from the bottom stair. He knew things for Elise were never simple. He’d give her some time to herself, though all he wanted to do was go into the room and stroke her hair and tell her that things would work out, that they would see each other.
That was the easy bit, the harder part was saying it was OK her aunt had died. That death couldn’t be too bad, it was just the end of life, he’d seen it often. At least he’d worked on the cadavers. But he’d never really known someone who died, no-one in his life had just disappeared. His grandmother had died, but he was too young then to understand. Everyone else was still around, and he squinted as he tried to imagine someone, like his mother or one of his brothers just no longer being.
Because that was what death was, a lack of life. The body was still there with all its fibres and bones and organs, they were just no longer ticking over. They were still. And in that stillness Eddy sometimes sensed, as he ran his scalpel across the greying skin, a relief.
When the news came through he was able to be useful. His studies of the brain let him translate for Elise and her family what had happened. The haemorrhage would have left her confused and numb, so there would have been little if any pain. Gradually the brain was flooded with blood, and so slowly it would have shut down the body’s functions. The grief at this was understandable. But, in his mind, though he could never say it, there were worse ways to go.
As he’d sat, watching Elise, he tried to imagine her feelings. She was closed, too sad to talk, the sobbing had finished and she sat there with her eyes swollen and her nose looking sore. She was a picture of misery, and Eddy wished that he didn’t feel so distanced from her and the grief. Grief was something he’d seen a lot of; at the death of children in the hospital; relatives in the emergency ward. He separated himself from it with clear lines of knowledge, this is what happened and this is why, I understand, I read a paper on it, led the discussion, have done the research, seen the numbers. But, with grief coming to live in his own house he wasn’t sure what to do. The knowing why it happened didn’t help. Elise wasn’t interested in the pathology. She didn’t want to know what the latest data showed. That was why he’d sat, glassy eyed, looking at her. That was what had sent her upstairs shouting. Eddy just hated it when it came to this.
‘Hey, man, what’s happening?’ Stew had just let himself in the front door.
‘Oh,’ Eddy was momentarily startled. And, as he looked at Stew squinting his stoner’s sqint, a pang of love for Elise and everything she was squeezed its way out of his chest and made him turn and go up the stairs. ‘Not much Stew, not much at all.’
Eddy opened their door and found Elise lying on the bed, face down. He put the boot back in the corner and slid down into the bed beside her.
‘I know it’s not your fault,’ Elise mumbled through the bedclothes, ‘but I just can’t make you OK when I’m not. I can’t help you cope with me not coping.’
‘It’s OK.’ Eddy put his arms around her. ‘I don’t want you to.’
‘But I hate making you feel this bad.’
‘I hate you feeling this bad. And you’re not making me feel bad. I’m just not sure what to do.’
‘Don’t do anything then. Just don’t look at me like this.’ And she turned around to fix her gaze on him, drooping her eyes and mouth.
‘I am not looking at you like that.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘Well, sorry, but I think it was more like this.’ And Eddy summoned his worst impression of himself, allowing his glasses to slide down his nose and his eyes to widen.
‘No…’ Elise was smiling, no she was laughing at him. Thank god. After a week of sadness… ‘Why are you grinning like a maniac?’
‘I’m not a maniac.’ But he thought of the way the body had to be flown home from the Fiji holiday. Elise’s family’s shock that such a thing could happen. That someone could be dead and postcards could still arrive from them in the mail.
‘Lets go and get chocolate, I feel the need for chocolate cake.’
‘OK.’ And he sprang up in that way he had of suddenly being on his feet. It made Elise think that he’d never be caught off balance. Always be able to find up. ‘But I’m not going to let you forget that you just threw a huge silver boot at me.’
‘Oh God, I didn’t hit you, did I?’
‘No, you didn’t, but it was a close thing.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m just so…’ She waved her hands, and sitting with her legs folded under her, hips to one side, hair akimbo he loved her better than ever before. Please be happy for a while, he thought as he took hold of that waving hand. Please let’s leave this sadness in the house and go away from it.
He put his arm around her waist as they shut the front door. It fitted there, just so, as if it was made for him to hold. She put her head into his shoulder, where she felt it fitted, and all the morbid thoughts that had hovered around her hushed down, like rain on the roof. And as they walked towards Glebe Point Road she said:
‘Jan is – I mean was – a rich woman, you know. It’s as if some scenario that we always played as children has become reality. All the cousins, all her nieces and nephews, we were always playing that the rich aunt would die, that there was all this mystery and intrigue and … I don’t know, it feels strange. She was only fifty-two. That’s young, really isn’t it? Mum says that there’s a will, she’s only just written, and that there’s something for all the nieces and nephews. I mean, it feels weird, as if as kids we were acting out something that would become real.’ And Elise was back in the café with her mother, watching her cry in that wretched way you do when the sadness is too much even for tears. She heard her mother sob dryly as the checked table cloth – but it wasn’t even cloth, it was laminated so the waitress could come with a sponge and wipe away whatever had been spilt – imprinted onto her retina she had stared at it for so long.
They walked down the hill, the evening fading into night, currawongs calling from the camphor-laurels in the church-yard, the traffic lights glowing in the gathering dusk. They had their head so close together that, to them, walking, leaning into one another, there was nothing else in the world but the two of them. And Eddy knew it would be all right, he knew that things were going to be fine.

One

Where did Elise get her confidence? There she was making her way up the sandstone path through the overgrown garden with an absolute surety. It was the way she moved, balanced so, her small body quick through the light and shadow. Her life just fell into place around her, Sasha decided. How could anyone be so sure? Elise was the one who had decided they would move to the old house. She had quit her job in the city, leaving Sasha uneasy. She just shed one existence and was moving through a new one in less than a week. Sasha wished she could do these things so easily.

She turned away from the small waving figure and back to her car. Already, the cicadas in the spotted gums around the house were making her ear drums buzz and she’d only just pulled in.

Elise looked as if she belonged here. She fitted onto the path, the fibro beach shack that had been in her family since the early 50s seemed to embrace her. Her hair was wet, probably from a swim. The way she dived into the water off the jetty was too much for Sasha. Her teeth went on edge, like they always did when the boys would scratch their nails down the blackboard at school. How could Elise throw off her clothes and toss herself into the water? How did she know no-one would be looking? How did she know that Sasha wouldn’t look at the way her skin continued from her neck down to her breasts and out onto her belly like one skein of fabric? How did she know nothing would come up out of the murky deep of the water where the sunlight couldn’t get to, and grab her, bite her, pull her down? What was it that buoyed her to the surface so readily? And why did the African irises and asparagus ferns that infested the slope of garden right down to the water’s edge brush against Elise’s bare legs, where they always seemed to scratch Sasha.
Well, maybe confidence came with ownership. Elise was about to inherit the house, or at least part of it. Even now, as she pulled her last few belongings out of the Barina, Sasha wondered if she could live up to her friend’s dreams for her. As she took out her bedding, putting it reluctantly on the dirty sand, the sense of freedom, the sense that anything was possible, that the two of them would make things happen, left her. And in its stead the wretched hollow opened in her again.
‘How was the drive?’ Elise asked, reaching out an embrace.
‘Fine, fine.’ Sasha tried to be breezy, a deep breath of the salty air. Elise smelt of ocean, she smelt like the hot leaves in the scorch of the sun. Her hug was brief, mechnical. Sasha found herself wanting to hold her by the waist, like Eddy did when he was walking with her. Sasha wanted to lay her head on her friend’s shoulder and cry. But she struggled against it, like she had been against falling asleep next to Elise these last few nights, and turned away.
‘The piano made it.’ Elise smiled. Sasha breathed in sharply and looked back at her friend. How had she forgotten the piano? In her dreams Sasha had seen it float out into Pittwater, wreaked and gutted, it was sunk too deep in the green water to dive for. Sasha helpless on the shore couldn’t get a boat, couldn’t get anyone to see how she needed the piano, or her concert would be cancelled, her career in ruin. In her dream she had a career in music. She was the centre of something. Everyone needed her to perform. The removalists just laughed at her. Sasha, woke grieving from her sleep to find herself on the far side of Elise’s futon, the sun lapping at the curtains. There was a sense, in her dream, that Elise was somehow responsible. And this worried Sasha, so she would lie absolutely still and just listen to Elise in the kitchen, boiling the kettle, the gurgle of her stovetop espresso, the pad of her bare feet out onto the verandah. And sometimes Sasha felt that it might just be possible – as she had that first morning they met – for Elise, her thin wrists, the spring in her step, the way she turned her head to listen and would talk about anything, things that other people spent so much energy avoiding – for her to fill that gap Sasha heard in herself.
‘I thought you’d want to know. Hey let me take that.’ And Elise brushed Sasha’s arm as she reached for the pile of sheet music and the bag of groceries. ‘They were nice guys, the piano guys, they stayed for a coffee. They said you might need to tune it soon though, because of the salty air, humidity.’
‘They stayed for a coffee?
‘Yeah, I think they thought it was an interesting old house.’
‘And you were interesting too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they are just removalists. I paid them half my salary to move that piano, you don’t have to be all that nice to them.’
‘Don’t worry, they had to work hard to get it down the path.’
‘Uh.’ And Sasha felt stupid, as if her friend had just seen right through her and was laughing at her.


The drive from the city, through the old suburbs, along the winding ribbon of the Monavale Road and out onto the peninsular was enough to send the breath right up into your chest. Through the trees you got glimpses of the sea, bluer than you’d think it could be against the sky. The drive took long enough for Sasha to practice her arias, her scales and sing along with the Best of Crowded House CD. She’d calculated the route, counting the traffic lights, comparing the bridge with the detour and now, having done the drive five times, she knew which lanes to get in, where she could overtake. She enjoyed the driving, enjoyed doing the two things at once: singing and accelerating. When you pulled in to Avalon, the sea air speckled the windscreen with salt. Sasha would obediently slow to a crawl with the traffic, turn the fans down and lean over to open the passenger window. The whole drive had a sense of history to it, the old houses, the big trees, the roads following the contours of the hills, not cutting through and across them. Sasha found it frustrating and yet, somehow it also made sense to some part of her. She liked the leers of the surfers as she sped past them, her mane of wavy hair catching in the draught. She liked, too the looks she got from the older men, the balding ones in suits driving their smart cars, who would peer over their sunglasses at her, approvingly. If only my dad could see me now, she’d think. Or Elise.




Elise was having coffee with Eddy and some of his friends, when Sasha approached them. She was a friend of a friend, and she sat down next to Elise. Had she been at David’s party, yeah that one with the wings theme? Elise felt she knew her from somewhere, the familiarity of her hands, the shape of her eyes, the way she laughed with abandon?

‘Were you at the fireman’s ball about two months ago?’

‘Ah, yes I was. I was the one in the canary yellow.’

‘Well, that must be how I know you then.’

‘That would explain it.’ And they laughed together at the quickness of the exchange, how they were both on their toes. Talking the same chat lines, the same stupid conversations that others took so seriously. The warmth, like flirting, but doing it safely because there was Eddy sitting just there, and this woman was only waiting for a takeaway coffee.

Sasha smiled at Elise, the kind of smile that had that warmth, and recognised the warmth was returned, and that there was a seam of it to mine.

They found that they were both working on creative projects without support. They were frustrated with the city. They were tired of trying to earn enough money to pay the rent. Flatmates were difficult. So much that seemed so enticing about earning money just left you no time to write or sing, and how could you ever make it writing or singing if you had to meet these societal expectations placed on you by your family and friends who didn’t understand why you needed to be creative? Why was it that you needed to do what everyone expected anyway?

The quick easy way that Sasha talked, so fluent in the problems that were only just becoming problems for Elise, impressed her. Sasha brushed her hair over her shoulder and spoke with vigour and conviction. She splayed her hands to emphasise her point. She seemed to have endless empathy for how Elise was feeling. And as they talked the banter of the group spilt around them. Sasha nodded and laughed and stayed to drink her takeaway, perched on the arm of someone’s chair. Elise watched Sasha’s hands, the olive skin against the bright silver rings.

‘I live across the road. Why don’t you come over and hear this song I’m telling you about?’

‘Love to.’ And Elise just got up, and brushing Eddy’s shoulder to let him know she was going, she left the café with Sasha.