Hope Farm (31 page)

Linda had made arrangements for Ishtar's remains to be cremated, and the ashes arrived by mail the next week. Over dinner we discussed what to do with them — at least, Linda kept saying it was up to me, and I kept saying I didn't know what to do. In the end we put the decision off and the plastic urn with its heavy, gravelly-sounding contents went into the spare room as well.

I sank gratefully back into work on my master's degree, resumed my every-second-day swims at the local pool, met with Linda once a fortnight for lunch or dinner.

It wasn't until the study year was over and I found myself adrift as usual in those vacant couple of months, swimming every day for want of something to do, reading gluttonously, and looking forward a bit too much to the newspaper's cryptic crosswords, that I took the suitcase out from under the bed and opened it and found the notebook.

It was on top, a slim exercise book, like the ones used in schools. On the cover, in the box with spaces for
Name
and
Subject
, a single word had been printed:
Ishtar
. My skin tightened.

I set it aside. Underneath, as well as what I'd expected to find — Ishtar's expired passport, her birth certificate, the remaining photo of me and the other hippie kids — there was a large sheet of a slippery kind of paper, folded in half. I pulled this out first and unfolded it.

It was a copy of a page from a newspaper dated 6th January 1986. It wasn't a photocopy — the paper was different; it had the same slick surface on the inside as well, and the quality wasn't quite as good. I ran my fingers over it with recognition. At school, we'd visited the state library and been shown the microfilm machines — how you could flick through collections of newspapers, select a page, and have it printed out. That was what this was. She must have found it herself, after her return from overseas. Pity twanged in me at the thought of her poring over dates and headlines, inching her finger along the words the way she used to do if nobody was looking. I smoothed the page where it lay on the carpet.
Search Ends for Missing Man
, read the headline.

The search for a man who went missing in central Gippsland over a week ago has ended with no success.

Walter Ronald Miller, aged 36, has not been seen since the night of 20th December when he left a party at a property near Kooralang, in central Gippsland.

Miller was seen leaving the party in a confused state and thought to be under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

Police believe it is possible Miller fell into one of many abandoned mineshafts located in bushland adjacent to the property, some of which are too deep and unstable to be searched.

So it had stayed with her as well. She had gone to the library and looked up this article — it probably took her a whole day — and copied it, and then kept it, here with her skimpy collection of meaningful things. She had cared enough to do all that.

Pushing myself away from the case and its contents, I leaned against the wall. I had learned to stop asking myself this question — it made me angry, and there was nowhere for that feeling to go. But here it came again, scuttling in uninvited, trailing its strands of rage. What did Ishtar suspect that morning when we returned to the messed-up hut? What conclusion did she draw from the obvious signs of upheaval? And from my actions: my hasty, guilty retrieval of the torch; my pathetic, pre-emptive explanation? She had known Miller had headed for the hut — Dan had told her. The anger slapped up against me, caught and clung. How could she have left it at that? She knew I was involved in whatever had happened. Why didn't she shake it out of me, the truth, relieve me of it? She was my
mother
.

Her face came into my mind, during that moment at my school graduation night, when she'd looked at me as if I was a stranger, someone she was interested in. Who was I, to her? A burden first, and then a stranger.

I refolded the slippery bit of paper. Now a different kind of anger was moving in, big and blockish. What was I supposed to do with my secret, now that she was gone?

I no longer woke with the fear of discovery snatching my breath: police at the door — the kind of fears you have in the middle of the night when you're a kid. I had dealt with those fears, chipped away at them with logic. Even if it all came out — if Ian for some crazy reason confessed after all this time — we had acted in self-defence. We were running away from him, we were terrified. But I think that, tied up with that half-buried, postponed idea of eventually coming to some understanding of Ishtar, there had been the assumption that, one day, I would tell her. I would unload, make her take it — her share of the burden, the guilt.

I put the article away and took out the notebook, and a loose piece of paper fell from between its pages. Ishtar's laboured boxy writing, scored with crossings-out, only a few lines:

To my daughter Silver Lakshmi Liberty Landes,

I have to tell you some things. I have kept all this a secret because I never wanted you to feel like any of it was your fault.

Some times I think you should never be told. But some times I think it will help

It broke off there. I turned the paper over but there wasn't any more.

My throat was hurting. I went back to the notebook and flipped through it.

It was filled — every page. I'd never seen so much of her handwriting in the one place; I'd only ever seen it in isolated lines, printed on forms mostly. Here the words were densely packed, covering the pages so completely they seemed to pulse, wave-like. There were no paragraphs, just infrequent line breaks that stood out like beacons.

I turned to the first page and read the opening line:
I saw him watching.

I am older now than she was when we said goodbye at the airport. I'm older than she was when she died. I see women in their early thirties and they look so young to me, still plumped with youth, full of strength and forward momentum. If they do harbour secrets — like my mother did, like I do — then perhaps they have not yet slowed down enough for them to catch up, to really take hold.

Ishtar stepped through those gates, tall and strong and unknowable as ever, defined by her stunting, unshared past, fashioned from it. I was her daughter and I never knew her story. I am older than she ever got to be and even now I don't think I could come close to imagining what it would be like to have such a choice — if you could call it that — forced on you at that age, to have to make it with your soft, unfinished mind. And then to have to go on with the outcome — to bind your young self to it, to merge with it and its attendant doubts until they became a part of you. To do that alone. I suppose you would have to live something like that to understand.

I kept expecting the past to fade, but as time has gone on I've found myself thinking about it more instead of less. Of course, it's so much easier now to make contact with the past — or at least with things that connect you to it. Perhaps that's it, the lure: the irresistible availability of information. Whatever the reason, just recently I have begun looking people up. Not to make contact — just to see what is out there, in the public domain, about them. What
profile
they have.

When I took the first step — typing
Ian Munro
into Google — I was incredibly nervous. I suppose I'm showing my age, my lack of affinity with this type of technology. It's ridiculous, but I felt furtive. Despite — or perhaps because of — my reasonably good understanding of how it works, I don't entirely trust the internet.

Ian is an actor. Stage, not screen. He lives in the UK, in Brighton. He seems to be quite successful; I have read reviews of his performances that use words like
luminous
and
captivating
— words I couldn't help hearing in his rusty fourteen-year-old voice, loaded with wry emphasis. There are a few images. One or two formal, publicity-type headshots in which he stares down the camera, chin resting on the knuckles of one folded hand. His cheekbones are extraordinary; he has that sort of clever, fine-featured look that makes me think of racehorses and greyhounds.
Noble
— that's the word. These photos are posed though; their effect is intentional. It's another image of him I keep going back to, that brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. It's of him on stage, performing. He is wearing a suit coat and slim-cut pants, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and he is stepping forward, arms raised. The angle is from below, so the impression is of length and height — he grew into a tall man — but I see the child in him, the gangliness, the skittishness. I see him by the creek, darting through the trees, frenetic and elusive, his private misery a crackling aura, white-hot against the shadows. I hope that now there is no part of himself that he feels he needs to hold back.

I googled the word ‘Jindi', but could only find sites about a cheese-making company of the same name, and about businesses associated with a town called Jindivick, in eastern Victoria. Maybe she changed her name. Val I have no chance of finding; I never knew her as anything other than Val.

Dan Cohen is a common name; Dan and Daniel Cohens are a dime a dozen on the internet. There is one I have found though who lives in Austin, Texas, and is a very well-regarded sound engineer and producer. The available information about him is almost all about his work, but one article describes him as ‘Australian born', and mentions a background in New York's post-punk scene of the mid to late 1980s. There are no images of him online. Sometimes I think about digging deeper, but then I imagine discovering I've got the wrong Dan, and that my Dan is some ordinary bloke, with a Facebook account showing him on holiday with his family, or renovating his house in an outer suburb of Melbourne. Of course, there is no shame in being an ordinary bloke — and Dan would have made a very good and probably quite happy husband and father and renovator of houses — but I suspect I would be disappointed by this outcome.

I can still see him opening his packages of records, the eagerness of his fingers; I can still feel him behind me on the bike as we blaze down the road, carving apart the grey evening, the lowering sky, sending tremors through the paddocks. I am still quite attached to that vision of his lanky figure walking calmly out into the world, climbing on board a plane, setting off without fanfare to do what he'd always meant to do.

There are labels that could be applied to Miller, explanations for his behaviour. Drug-induced psychosis. Bipolar disorder. Borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. But if those terms existed back then, they weren't commonly used the way they are now, and what would they have meant to a thirteen-year-old, anyway? To me he was monstrous — endlessly powerful, endlessly threatening. He was the only person I ever saw challenge Ishtar's power, meet it, send shock waves through its implacable force field. He was the chisel's blade, smashing down on all of us, sending everything flying apart.

Very occasionally I am able to think of him as vulnerable, damaged in his own fashion. I remember Dawn's rustling whisper —
lost his way
— and the image of that ear hiding among the hair, small and pink, and unexpectedly pitiful. Of course he had lost his way, at some point. Maybe Dawn's story of genuine young love being gradually eroded was valid — or maybe he had manipulated her from the beginning. There's no way of telling. The important thing is, whether it happened in his twenties or earlier, he had turned. And when you think about it, what made him monstrous to me was not actually him — it was Ishtar's failure to come between the two of us, to shield her child as a mother should. In any case, it's been easier to stick with the fictional Miller, the monster. It's been easier, in my mind, to lay a monster to rest.

Linda and I still meet for dinner once a fortnight. Afterwards we go to see a film together. I have never shown her the notebook or told her about it. I don't believe in honesty for its own sake. If her parents were still alive it might be different. But they're not, and what good could it do her to alter her memories of them now, to sully them? As for her memories of or regard for Ishtar — as far as I am concerned there is nothing to correct there. Linda never judged; she has always been too guileless, too decent.

Ishtar's ashes remain in storage, in the cupboard in the spare room of my own flat now, along with her other possessions — and the fifty-dollar note she gave me for Christmas that morning. I am still unable to decide what to do with them. When someone dies, people talk about
what they would have wanted
, about respecting this and making decisions accordingly. So what do you do when you have no idea what the person might have wanted? When their desires, their ambitions — what it was, if anything, that might have brought them true, lasting joy — are more or less unknown to you?

Linda has suggested that I make the decision based on what
I
want, on what would help me put Ishtar to rest — the Ishtar in my mind. This seems a valid option, but I have not yet been able to commit to it. I have thought about scattering them at Hope, in the bush surrounding the hut, or in the creek. To honour what it was I felt there with her — almost-happiness, or potential happiness. But that would mean going back and I'm not ready to do that, to find the hut a ruin once more or perhaps gone altogether. To face the ghosts, or go anywhere near Miller's secret grave for fear of disturbing the seal I've put on him in my mind. And because, underneath all my rationalisations about what happened, about it not being actual murder, I do still fear inviting suspicion — the slim but real possibility that some local stickybeak, collector of stories, clipper of newspaper columns, might spot me stumbling around up on that hill in my city clothes and remember the missing man, might take down my number plate and get on the phone to the police.

A few years ago I went to see a therapist. I only went for a few sessions. She kept accusing me of
managing
things, of intellectualising instead of feeling.

I look at my life and I see what she means. My small, tidy flat. My safe job, my research, my office where I have things the way I want them and enjoy just the right level of friendly distance from my colleagues. One evening a week I work as a volunteer, tutoring young students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I probably have my own versions of Linda's cloistered speech idiosyncrasies. I have a group of friends like hers, single women who have ‘given up'. I haven't had much luck with long-term relationships. I don't like change. I still swim.

All this, yes, is managing.

I think of Ishtar raking out that chicken coop. Chopping wood, sweeping, sewing. The swing and twist of her patterns: opening, closing, beginning, ending, arriving, leaving. Moving on, moving on, moving on. And I think that sometimes, perhaps, managing is all that can be done.

She was not right, though — the therapist — about the feelings. Not completely right, anyway. They can't be avoided altogether. They are there. They seem to exist on some plane of their own, and I have simply learned to live, as unobtrusively as possible, alongside.

Some mornings as I wake up, before coming fully to consciousness, I am visited by a memory so profound it is a bodily experience. I am a child, lying with her in bed. A mattress on the floor somewhere, in some half-furnished room — it doesn't matter which one.

She has her back to me as always, but it is her — her body against mine, its living, warm weight. I don't know if she's asleep or awake, but she hasn't moved yet, hasn't risen and dressed and gone.

She breathes.

I can smell her. Her hair, her skin.

I feel it, then.