Then, as an afterthought:
Thanks.
CHAPTER FIVE
Three days after landing
BOX UPON BOX upon box. Here in this unassuming storage container in Bankstown is all that remains of my Old Life. I stand on the precipice looking in—as though there’s danger within, as though I’ll have to slay a dragon if I move any further.
The dragon—if in evidence—has been here for a long time, since I locked the sliding door eight years ago and haven’t been back since. Even when Dad died I stayed away. It was all too much, too hard. I was too angry and I knew that wasn’t appropriate. Grief was called for, but I’d grieved already. His death was a mere formality; he’d cast the die a long time ago, positioning himself for a state of decline that nobody could drag him from.
I shake my head, fully aware of the damage these thoughts can do, and pull my scarf more tightly around my neck, buttoning up my jacket as though it’s some kind of shield, before moving into the small space. There’s a light to my right. I turn it on, sneeze a couple of times as my nose adjusts to the dust, then stand still, right in the middle of the remnants of who I used to be. Boxes to the right are easy—clothes. They can go to a charity shop. I don’t think I’d fit into any of the things I wore as a teenager, nor do I think I’d still like them.
Schoolbooks are beneath them. I run a finger over the corrugated cardboard, then move deeper. A small grey box brings back a rush of familiarity. I pull it from where it sits, wedged between a shelf and another box, and liberate the lid.
My breath catches. My fingers fumble. I pull the photos out, a visceral ache spreading through me.
Dad.
His eyes look back at me, so alive, so bright, it’s impossible not to remember every detail of the day I took this photo. It was morning—he was always at his best in the mornings. We’d had our first rain of the wet season, but the storm had begun to clear overnight.
‘Come on, kiddo. Let’s go see if there are any frogs about.’
I was no longer a ‘kiddo’ but the name had stuck. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t realised that I was growing up. Eighteen and convinced I was on the precipice of serious maturity.
I’d been waiting to tell him. About Dave, about the baby we’d conceived, about the fact we’d decided to get married and rent a little house together on the outskirts of town.
But the morning had been so perfect, and perfect mornings with Dad were so rare. I hadn’t wanted to ruin it.
I took the photo spontaneously. I always had my camera with me back then. I made a joke and he laughed and, before he could realise what I was doing, I opened the shutter and snapped this picture.
I run my finger over the edge now, slowly, reverently, wondering how many photos you could take of someone to reconstruct them completely? I feel as though, in this photo, he’s so very real, I can almost hear his laugh reverberating across the fabric of time.
I place the picture on top of a different cardboard box and keep sifting through the images. I was in a black and white phase—moody, angsty teen pictures, clearly the work of someone who loved listening to Hole and Marilyn Manson. I shake my head, a wry smile touching my lips.
Photos of Sundown Creek knot my stomach with nostalgia. I sit cross-legged on the cold concrete floor of the storage shed, not really feeling the iciness. I’m not here in Bankstown; I’m back in the town where I grew up. I can hear the birds flying over the creek, the low hum of farm machinery, the distant whirring of the mysterious airplanes that used to fly overhead, gracefully bringing themselves down over Sydney.
Dave.
I find his photo right at the bottom. Dave, with his shaggy blond hair and freckles across his nose, aviator sunglasses and the air of someone who was older than his years. As a high school kid he looked more like a uni student, and he acted like it too. He was the first one of his year level to get a driver’s licence, first one to get a car.
I was so impressed by him. I place the photo with the one of Dad, and then add one of our old home too, but there’s a heaviness within me as I do that. Because home is still there. Dad’s gone. Dave’s gone. Our baby’s gone, but the home is there and sooner or later I’m going to have to face the music and go back—even if just to clean it out and get it ready to sell.
My throat knots at the thought of that. I haven’t been back since that weekend.
Of their own accord, my eyes shift sideways.
Don’t Open
Dramatic nineteen-year-old me scrawled the warning to my future self, as if knowing that the loss would never get easier. The little bags of baby clothes, perfectly clean, ready for our child, were all there, waiting to be filled out with chubby arms and legs. But they never had.
I couldn’t bear the idea of donating them, even though I should have. Good clothes like that needn’t have gone to waste. But they belonged to our baby and it seemed to me that if we couldn’t give him life we could at least honour his death and keep something—some tangible proof of his existence, even when everyone else, even when time itself, moved on.
I stand up, wiping my hands on my thighs, and get to cataloguing the rest of my stuff. If I’m going to stay in Sydney I need to know what’s here. Most of it will go. Not all.
Apparently twenty-seven-year-old me is no more inclined to part with the clothes our baby would have worn, had he lived, than nineteen-year-old me was.
The photos, my old film cameras and film, that will stay with me too.