by Gabrielle Blondell
Please Mum, I know you’re busy, but I want you to meet my fiancé. The Crab House, 7:30pm.
Joanna
Elise stared at her phone, eyeing it warily and waiting, as if something else might issue from it. Her personal assistant strode into the room, cradling the day’s agenda.
“The presentation starts in two minutes,” Bronwyn said.
Bronwyn was like herself. She didn’t round things up or down. She was precise. Two minutes was two minutes. Elise slipped her phone into her pocket. “Right then, let’s go.”
~
Michael Bruin was deconstructing the team’s ad campaign with the aid of his laser pointer when Elise first heard it – the slap of feet on wet rock. She sat upright in her chair and clasped her hands tightly together. Bruin took this as a positive sign, snapping off the laser pointer and beaming at his colleagues. Slap, slap. The boom and hiss of a wave. Elise felt a gentle shaking on her wrist.
She saw Bronwyn’s hand there, brown and weathered against her own, and looked up and into expectant faces, none more so than Bruin’s. “I’m sorry?” she said.
Bruin still stood beside the PowerPoint screen. “We wondered what you thought?” he said, as if he already knew.
She, in turn, wondered how old he was. Surely, older than her daughter, Joanna. “I think it needs more work,” she said, abruptly.
Immediately, Bruin’s self-confidence slid from his face. She watched it vacate his body like a rod being extracted from his arse. Her daughter, Joanna, seemed older, she thought. Marriageable now, apparently.
~
The corridor bisecting their floor was an avenue of glass. The LED lighting gave it a blue tinge, the hue of a wave’s interior. Slap. Slap. Elise hurried on. Salt lay like sweat on her skin.
Ellie.
The heavy door to the women’s rest room slammed shut behind her. Elise bent over the sink and washed her face.
Ellie, I’m here.
She wiped her face with a paper towel. She pushed its roughness into her eyes, not caring about her makeup, not wanting to look up. When she did finally, her brother, Robert, was there. She saw him in the mirror’s reflection, small and thin, his collarbones as spare as a coat hanger. She saw the freckles on his childish nose.
I’m here.
His mouth didn’t move. The sound bypassed it, as it did her ear. It was as if they communicated directly – brain to brain. His eyes glinted, dark brown, almost black.
Joanna is getting married.
She knew his look. She’d felt it when she married Joanna’s father. She couldn’t escape it then, not until the divorce.
“You’re dead,” she said out loud. Her words bounced savagely off the tiled walls.
~
Elise sat at her desk with the door to her office closed. Beyond the mirror, Robert was less solid. He dipped and dove about the room, his edges a blur.
Do you think I would have got married? I think I would have.
Elise began to tremble and then to shake.
Marriage didn’t work for you, did it Ellie? How long was it? Five years?
Elise knew he was taunting her. Her teeth chattered in her head. Five years. She had hung on for as long as she could.
Do you think they will have kids? You will be a grandmother. I will be a great-uncle, won’t I? I will be the best great-uncle there ever was. Robert’s voice was high and lilting. It possessed no adult timbre. Not now, not ever. I would have been a great father, wouldn’t I?
Elise sat and drew a document toward her. Her shaking hands wrinkled the pages. She could not answer him. How could she know what he would have become if he had lived?
~
“Are you alright, Elise?”
She had opened the door of her office and ejected herself into the small anteroom which was Bronwyn’s domain. Her thinking was, if she let the world in, perhaps Robert would return to wherever he was meant to be. Even while she was thinking it, she knew it would take more than this to be free of him.
“Elise?” Bronwyn stood by her, her arms outstretched as if to steady her.
“Yes?” Elise asked too loudly. She needed to pull herself together.
Bronwyn’s gaze flicked from the open door to Elise and down to the folder in her arms.
Ellie. Robert flitted through her office door and swirled through the anteroom. I would have been the best father there ever was.
“Is there anything matter?” Bronwyn asked, her brows drawn inwards below her high forehead.
Robert wove himself between them, in wild figure-eights.
“My daughter rang,” Elise said, without knowing why.
Bronwyn’s brows separated and climbed back up her forehead, much higher than before. “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” she whispered as if others might hear.
Robert stopped swinging between them and retreated to a corner. He hung there, watching.
“I do,” Elise said, and suddenly it came to her clearly. “She’s twenty-seven.”
“Oh,” Bronwyn said.
“She is getting married. She wants me to meet her fiancé.”
“Right,” Bronwyn nodded, clearly wanting more.
“Joanna was always closer to her father,” Elise added, as if to explain.
“Right?” Bronwyn said again, both an answer and a question.
The faintest outline of Robert wafted down the hall, away from them.
~
They lay on their bellies, knees bent, the soles of their feet pointing up to the summer blue sky. The black mat of the trampoline was warm beneath them.
“I’m going to be an astronaut,” Robert said. “I’ll be the first to set foot on Mars. Once I’ve set it all up, you can come and visit me.”
Elise could see her mother at the sink through the kitchen window. “Could Mum come too?” she asked.
“Sure,” Robert said.
Elise grinned at her little brother. The summer before, he was going to be a racing car driver and he had offered to take her on a fast lap around Bathurst. She had believed him then too. He pushed out into the world in a way she was content not to.
~
Bruin sidled into the room, showing her a slither of himself. He sat across the desk and cleared his throat repeatedly, like a car engine refusing to start.
Robert swung into the room. He hung behind Bruin and smirked. Elise looked away from him and concentrated on the young man before her.
“I’d like you to read the brief again,” she said.
“I have,” Bruin said.
“Did you consider it carefully or have you already decided what should be done?” Elise asked.
Bruin nodded earnestly, misunderstanding her. “You see, we did some brainstorming between us and the idea presented itself. It was too good to pass up. We all agreed.” His voice had risen a register.
“So no, you didn’t consider the brief then?”
“We thought it was better. Our idea, I mean. We thought the client would love it more – ”
“ – more than their own idea?” Elise asked.
“Well, yes.” Bruin was beginning to realise his mistake.
Robert, still floating in the dead air behind Bruin, leaned in close to Bruin’s ear and blew. Bruin’s fingers fluttered there.
“Let’s go through it now, shall we?” Elise suggested, bending over the document. The sound of the sea roared in her ears. Her pointed finger, which hovered over the client’s summary, quivered.
I want to go to Joanna’s wedding. Robert was beside her now.
No. She could not have him there.
We could both walk down the aisle with her. Maybe she will be able to see me too.
“No!” This she said out loud and the fierceness of it ricocheted around the room.
Bruin and Bronwyn looked startled.
It was one long second before Bronwyn cleared her throat. “I can take care of this,” she said, “if you need to get on with more important things.”
“Yes, thank you,” Elise said.
~
Please go, Robert.
Elise sat at her desk with the door closed once more, while Robert swooped around the room.
Go where? Robert rolled over and back-stroked toward her languidly. As he passed, he laughed at her in the same way he had done so many times when he was alive. But Elise knew he was only half-joking. If she pushed too hard he would push back.
I don’t know. Where were you before this? I haven’t seen you since … (She wanted to say since before her divorce, when he had ruined everything) … that September, 22 years ago.
He stopped back-stroking and sat in the air, as if he were on an invisible chair. Where do you think I’ve been? It’s not like I go visiting people or hang out with crowds of other dead people. It doesn’t work that way.
Elise saw tears well in his eyes. Pressure built up behind her own eyes. She knew how incomplete his life had been.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
~
“Can we go down to the beach, Mum?” It was Elise who asked because she was the oldest.
Their mother had drawn a chair up to the old wooden table in their rented beach house and was looking through documents. Her half-moon eyeglasses were perched on her nose and her hair was covered with a bright orange scarf. Elise knew the papers had something to do with her work as a bookkeeper. She watched her mother frown. She knew to stand still and wait until she had thought things through. This was something Robert could never do.
The frown cleared and her mother cupped her chin in the palm of her hand and looked directly at Elise. “You know your brother, Ellie. You know you need to be careful because he is not.”
Elise realised this was true. “I will be careful. I promise,” she said.
Her mother nodded once. “Alright then. You are in charge. I will come down when I’m done with this,” she said, taking her palm from under her chin and placing it flat on the papers in front of her.
~
Elise stared through the windscreen. Attached to the concrete wall in front of her was a sign. RESERVED. And underneath, it said ELISE MONTPELLIER. A long time ago, she realised Robert would return to her whenever she reached a milestone he had been denied. Her marriage, Joanna’s birth, their mother’s death. When she couldn’t bear it anymore, she had made her life dull. She did nothing to provoke him and, for a long time, it had worked. But he was back now.
Elise inserted the key in the ignition and started the car.
Where are you going? Robert’s voice was high with fear.
~
Elise pushed her foot down on the accelerator and the car shot along the coast road.
Robert slipped into the front seat. Elise kept her gaze on the two white lines in the centre of the bitumen.
You can’t!
The carpark was empty when they arrived. A cold, stiff wind struck Elise when she stepped out of the car. Below them the sea roared. She started down the winding path.
~
It was the last full day of their long summer holiday. Their voices were high and clear like tinkling bells as they ran down the path toward the sea. She remembered the glee in her, the fizz of it along her arms and in her legs, the lightness inside her skull. As they ran and swooped and the waves seethed beneath them, it felt like they were flying with the gulls. At the steps, they paused and each took a deep breath of sea air and ran on again. They came to a landing where the stairs split, one leading to the beach and the other to the rocks where the fishermen gathered. Elise and Robert had seen them from the sand, perched like birds with their chins pointing out to sea and their arms wrapped around the handles of their long fishing rods.
“Let’s go,” Robert had said.
She hesitated. She saw her mother with her chin cupped in her hand.
“Ellie is a chick-en,” Robert yelled into the salty air. “Bruck, bruck, bruck,” he ran, with his elbows bent and his knuckles up under his armpits, flapping away.
“Okay,” she answered. Secretly, she wanted to stand on the rock ledge with the fishermen too.
Slap. Slap. Their little feet found purchase between the warm rocks and the shallow pools. Robert stopped at a deeper pool. Elise saw his wondrous face reflected in its surface. “Come on, I want to see the fishermen,” she called, the spirit of this adventure spilling out of her and making her the brave one.
It was she who came across the man around the corner of the jutting cliff. He stood on the edge dressed all in green with his rod bending over the sea.
“Go back!” he yelled to her, as he worked the reel. “This is no place for kids.”
The fisherman took a hand from his rod and pushed her roughly. “The tide is coming in,” he yelled. “Go. Back!”
Elise looked out to sea. Waves stood up in rows. Their blue-green arched toward her. She saw them curl and tumble, and their white foam fingers reach for her across the rock ledge. The fisherman abandoned his rod and grabbed her, looping an arm around her waist and lifting her above the surging water. It was while she dangled there that she remembered Robert. “My brother!”
“What?” The fisherman was concentrating on his footing.
“My little brother!” Elise pointed back toward the jutting cliff. They both looked to where the waves had already covered the rock and were bursting against the land.
An ache began in her chest then, a terrible hollowness beneath her ribs. “Robert!” she screamed as ropes were thrown down from the car park above. A man in orange overalls snatched her up. She hung from his harness, as he climbed, swinging out over the waves. “Robert! Robert!” She screamed his name all the way. As they reached the lip of the cliff, she thought she saw a black dot far out to sea. “Robert!” Hands grabbed her, turning her and when she swivelled her head back, the sea was empty, the black dot was gone.
~
Elise stepped toward Robert’s rock pool. The waves foamed at her feet.
Noooo! Robert called to her from the landing.
She turned towards the voice and saw a scrap of him as he flew toward her. She felt him with her, even though the wind was too strong for her to see him now. He hung around her shoulders like a shroud. But I must, she told him.
The urge was strong in her now. She anticipated relief. A wave clawed at her and she fell. She was dragged across the jagged rocks, pain soaring through her legs and arms. She let it happen.
Robert left her then. He was ripped from her shoulders and out of her body. She did not struggle. In her mind’s eye, Joanna was entering a church in a white gown. She held onto this image even as her hip struck the rock ledge and she knew it had broken. She saw the priest in his dark robes and another man, a young man. He stepped forward and took Joanna’s hand as salt water surged into her open mouth.