The Accident (23 page)

As if on cue, a crack and the sky lights up. Impeccable timing. Thunder on its heels—the storm is getting closer.

Four thousand, five thousand, six thousand…Another whipcrack, somewhere behind me, and then something whizzes right past, hits the metal drainpipe behind me with a zing. A barrage of sharp pings on the roof, above the sound of the rain and the wind. Hailstorm.

Ten thousand, eleven thousand…I reach for the cable, release it, hear or at least imagine the shutter snap closed. Through the murky plastic the image appears. Purple sky, spidery white bolts, green light along the horizon. Eerie. Beautiful. Perfect.

The driving wind rocks the tripod, legs start to bow. Hail now pelting down, flying in at all angles. A piece grazes my knuckles, ice burn. Heavenly shrapnel.

The camera. Knuckles will heal for free, but lenses are expensive and LCD screens easily damaged. I grab the tripod by its neck, draw the camera against me, smothered against wet clothes.

Inside, ignoring the puddle forming at my feet, I free the camera from the tripod and try to brush the water off the plastic coverings, cautious of getting the camera itself wet. I want to see the photo properly, check it’s as good as it looked on the review screen.

My phone rings again, Robbie. I pick it up, and his voice fills my ears, stressed. It’s getting pretty late. ‘Are you coming or what?’

‘Yeah, I’m on my way. Right now. Promise. I’ll be there in under half an hour.’

I hang up, peeling my wet clothes off as I go. If Robbie’s mad at me I’ll tell him he’s lucky to get picked up at all, he should be thankful to have a big sister willing to drive all that way on a rainy night to get him.

That’s all it was. Me wanting that last shot, making me late to pick him up, so we were sitting there at that intersection at that wrong moment…Twenty minutes earlier the street lights and the traffic lights had been working. Robbie and I would have got home in one piece. I’d be at uni right now studying photography and Robbie would be sitting at home playing his Xbox and life would be easy again, just like it always was.

‘What about if you included some of your other photos, too?’ Morgan asks slowly.

‘What other photos?’

‘The ones you’ve been doing in here. The architecture ones. They’d fit, wouldn’t they? Show the contrast? Your concept…’

That buildings outlast us. Robbie used to always think about that. He’s the one I stole the concept from. We’d be driving down a street full of old houses and he’d start thinking aloud about the fact that the people who built the houses, who lived their lives out in them, were gone and for the most part forgotten. Going to Europe and walking through the millennia-old streets blew his mind.

‘Think about how many millions of people have climbed these steps. Think about it. In a hundred years, is there going to be any evidence that we existed? You and me, I mean, and Mum and Alan. Maybe we’ll have grandkids who’ll still be alive and remember that we once existed, but nobody who really knew us. And in another hundred years after that, or two or three hundred years after that…Do you think there’ll be any trace of our street? Our house will be flattened and they’ll build highrises on top and there’ll never be any trace that we were even alive…’

I loved that he thought about that sort of thing. I used to tell him to shut up and stop being so pretentious, trying to be all philosophical, but secretly I was glad he wasn’t dumb like all the other boys, only interested in girls and sport.

‘Maybe one day they’ll make a statue of you,’ I told him once. I was only teasing and he knew it, but he loved the idea.

I think of my artwork and I think of Robbie. It’s not a statue, but it’s the closest you’ll get from me, brother of mine, at least for now.

After school, Iago and I go bush. It’s almost four but the sky is still clear and blue and the leaves are floating leisurely on their branches. I always feel safe in the bush, insulated against whatever else is going on in my world. But more than that, I feel okay again. I can draw in a deep breath and release it and all I’m thinking about is how green the leaves are and the feel of the slight breeze on my bare arms.

Iago has run ahead. I find him waiting patiently for me, tail wagging. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

He grins at me and takes off down the slope to the creek. I follow him down, careful as always because there’s a lot of loose dirt and if I slip I’ll end up in the water.

I stretch out on my tree, and I think, oddly enough, about Sarah Bancroft. Wondering if she hates me because she looks at me and thinks I’m somebody who has never known pain. Or maybe because she sees it in me, somehow, and that just makes her hate me all the more.

I think over Alan’s words, that we can’t always control what happens to us, we can only control what we do about it. He’s right. Maybe that’s how he can be so steady when it seems like the rest of the world is caving in. He’s not trying to find someone to blame or some simple answer to it all. Because it’s not simple. Every one of us—who and what we are—is the product of other people’s choices as well as our own. With billions of people on the planet all living their ordinary lives, how could we possibly track the cause and effect of any one, single event? Robbie and I were in the car at that intersection at that moment because I was running late. But if he hadn’t been at the play on that particular night, or there hadn’t been a thunderstorm, or Mum and Alan hadn’t been out at a dinner party, or any one of a thousand other scenarios, things would have worked out differently. We can’t change what happened. The other driver probably wishes she could, but she can’t either. All we can do is live knowing that we’re part of the bigger picture, and that stuff happens but we can’t let it ruin us.

Above me is a leaf dangling by a single spiderweb thread. It twists one way, then spins back the other, endlessly dancing without a breath of wind. I listen to Iago snuffling in the undergrowth and I watch my leaf and I know it’s okay, I’m okay, whatever happens now.

before
after
later

It’s the thud that wakes me, a crash outside my bedroom window. I jump out of bed and pull the curtains apart just in time to watch a pile of bound manuscripts fall from above. In the old trackies I wear as pyjamas, I head to Mum’s room and find her at the window with a box full of books, extra copies of one of her earlier novels. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Did I do it wrong?’

‘Do what wrong?’

‘Everything. Have I been a bad mother?’

I don’t answer her. I can’t. She goes on. ‘My own mother was always interfering in my life. I was so determined to let you make your own choices, your own mistakes. I thought I was doing the right thing.’

‘Mum…’ My stomach is starting to wrap itself up at her words. Did Lauren speak to her? What did she say? ‘Can you put the box down? If that lands on somebody you could kill them.’

I watch her lower it to the ground. Try to summon some calm, or at least the appearance of calm.

‘There’s still one more night of the play. You haven’t missed it. They’ve got the closing night tonight.’

‘She doesn’t even want me there.’

It doesn’t take a genius to call Morgan’s bluff. I feel frustration rising up in me at Mum using it as an excuse. ‘So? Go anyway.’

She looks down at the box at her feet as if it will give her answers. Finally she shrugs. ‘All right.’

Morgan doesn’t emerge from her bedroom till almost midday, wandering into the kitchen in her baggy pyjamas to pour herself Coco Pops. I’m sitting at the counter with the newspaper spread out in front of me, but I’m not reading it.

‘You doing anything today?’

Spoonful of cereal in hand, she looks up at me, suspicion crossing her face, like I’m about to ask her to help me with something unpleasant. ‘Why?’

‘I just thought we could hang out or something.’

That same suspicion, like she sees right through me, and hates me for trying to bridge the gap. She shakes her head. ‘I just want to stay home.’

‘I’ve been thinking about going to see Dad. Or calling him up, maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Why?’

I’m not sure I even know the answer to that myself. Am I really ready to have him as part of my life? Would he even want to be? Or is it just closure he’s after, forgiveness? What would it mean for us?

It’s hard to explain the feeling that’s starting to burn inside me, of seeing the possibilities, realising how much I actually want out of this life. I’ve never cared, before. I’ve never thought enough to myself to know I deserved better. ‘Because we need to make our world bigger, not smaller.’

We settle for an email. Cowardly, maybe, but it’s a start. Morgan sits cross-legged on her bed as I type it, chewing on her thumbnails the whole time, offering suggestions as we go. We tell him about what subjects we’re doing at school, about Lauren’s travels, Morgan’s play. Lame stuff, but safe ground to start on.

The mouse hovers over the send button. I look over to her. ‘Send it?’

A long moment. She nods. ‘Yeah.’

I don’t know how it makes her feel but my heart is pounding as I click the send button. Not entirely panic, though. There’s exhilaration in it, too, like I’ve thrown the dice and I don’t know what’s going to happen but I don’t really have anything to lose.

For a long minute we stare at the email screen, as if expecting a reply to arrive. Finally I shut the lid and Morgan looks at me. ‘Thanks. You’re a pretty good brother sometimes.’

That’s about as good as it’ll ever get from Morgan, I know. At least she’s willing to say it. I think Lauren would rather sew her mouth shut.

The doorbell rings. By the time I get there Lauren has already opened it. Kayla stands on the doorstep, in her leggings and a t-shirt, ready for a run.

I stop in the hallway, feeling the ghost of warmth from her touch, the way she clung on my back and whispered in my ear. Lauren gives me a look, eyebrow raised. Then she makes a ‘do what you want, you’re the one who has to live with it’ shrug, and she strides past me and disappears into her room.

Kayla watches her go. Her eyes are sparkling and her lips curve in an amused smile at my sister. I have never, in my life, felt more compelled to kiss someone. It’s like a physical force trying to pull me towards her.

I step closer, and as I do I see past her, to something on the lower step. ‘What—?’

She steps to the side and gestures to it, like a TV hostess displaying a prize. ‘I made you shelves.’

I can’t think of a time ever in my life anybody has made anything for me. Mum was never the sort to knit or sew stuff. She never saw the point. I never even had grandparents or aunts who made toys or clothes. The last handmade gift I got was probably a card about ten years ago, and even that was more my sisters being cheap than actually caring enough to craft something for me.

‘You made shelves,’ I repeat, staring. They’re about waist high, a metre squared with three shelves, stained a dark brown. They look like shelves you would buy in a furniture shop, nothing like the pile of plywood I saw in her garage.

‘You have books piled up all over your room. I figured you could use some shelves.’

She’s right. I’ve never had enough shelf space for all my books. They live stacked up on my desk, on the floor, in the top of my wardrobe. But Kayla has never been in my bedroom, or at least not since we were about six…

‘How did you—?’

‘I can see into your room from mine. I made them to match the rest of your furniture. Walnut stain.’ She pauses, grinning at me. ‘Is that too psycho-stalker next door?’

It probably is, but somehow I don’t care. She made me shelves. She really likes me.

‘I like you,’ I blurt out, because it’s that or I do jump on her and kiss her.

Her eyes sparkle all the more. ‘Good.’

The house is quiet when I get back from our jog. I have a quick shower, and then I go upstairs to Mum.

She’s not asleep this time. She’s standing in front of her full-length mirror, wearing dark jeans and a green knitted jumper, the colour she always used to wear because it brought out her eyes and showed off the copper of her hair. A silk scarf, because she thinks it looks arty, and her tweed coat on the bed, ready to go. I watch as she holds up one set of earrings, then another, trying to decide.