The Shadow House(40)

We sat on the sofa and I sank into the cushions. It might’ve been the sun or the beer or the spontaneous exercise, but I suddenly felt incredibly weary, as if the weight of the last few days – weeks, months – had just dropped from a great height and landed on my head.

‘Anything you want to talk about?’

He was just being nice, I knew that. It wasn’t a real offer. But even though Kit hadn’t reciprocated, talking on the dam had felt so good. No one had listened like that in years.

‘Probably not a good idea,’ I said. ‘If I start, I might not stop.’

Kit shrugged. ‘I’ve got time.’

I narrowed my eyes. ‘How about you tell me something first.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Anything. Where did you go to school? What’s your family like?’

Kit took a sip of his beer. ‘Okay. Well, I didn’t get on with my parents. Living with them was hard. Not in the same way you describe living with yours, but still difficult. I don’t speak to them anymore.’

‘Why not?’

He sighed. Opened his mouth, then closed it again. ‘Sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t think I really want to talk about that. Do you mind if I tell you something else, something different?’

I shrugged. ‘Go for it.’

He dropped his gaze into his lap. When he looked up again, I noticed his eyes were a deep shade of blue-grey, like glimpses of stormy ocean waves.

‘Some time ago,’ he said, ‘before Pine Ridge, I was in a very bad place. I had no direction, no motivation. I felt sad and unhappy almost all of the time. And then one day, I almost drove my car off a bridge.’

I felt myself take a sharp breath. Didn’t see that coming.

‘I’d stopped in the city. I could see the bridge, I knew where the gap was – and I was sitting there in the middle of the day, with the engine running and my foot on the pedal, just ready to go. And then this person walked past, this woman. Someone else followed, and then another person, and another. And suddenly – it was so weird – there were hundreds of them. Old people and babies and schoolkids and families, all carrying signs and shouting. I thought at first I was in trouble, I thought they were angry – but they weren’t, not exactly. I got out of the car and joined them, and the atmosphere … it was electric. Everyone was so energised, so full of hope. I’d never felt anything more powerful in my life.

‘Turned out,’ Kit said, ‘I’d inadvertently parked right next to the meeting point for a climate change protest. By the time I got back to my car, I felt different. I know it sounds dramatic, but that protest saved my life. And it sparked the very first idea for Pine Ridge.’ He gave me a wry smile. ‘I haven’t tried to drive off a bridge since.’

I studied him, unsure how to react. It was a big deal, sharing a story like that, and I could tell the emotion behind it was real. But there was something a little off about what he’d said, something I couldn’t put my finger on. He was definitely holding back. Not lying, exactly – more like choosing to leave things out.

‘Your turn,’ he said.

I decided to adopt the same game plan: share only what felt comfortable and leave out the rest.

‘Shortly after Ollie and I decided to stay in Sydney,’ I said, picking at the label on my beer bottle, ‘I met someone. I was lost without the road, and lonely. Ollie was at school all day and I couldn’t find my feet, so Stuart felt like the answer. He was charismatic, popular. He owned a couple of restaurants and was always surrounded by people; he gave me money, a home, a car. He took care of everything. I thought he was giving me what I wanted: the happy family, the fairytale. But I moved too fast. I was in too deep before I realised what I’d done.’ I shuddered, ashamed of how willingly I’d relinquished the reins of my life. ‘He hurt me. Many times.’

For a long while, I’d lived in a kind of trance. I allowed myself to be swept along and ignored the warning signs. The first time the sex got that little bit too rough. When he locked me in the house and took my keys. All the times he said he didn’t want me to work, that he was ‘traditional’ and wanted to be the ‘provider’, that it was best if he gave me a cash allowance. The first time he told me I was crazy, and the first time I questioned my own judgement. Maybe I am losing my mind. ‘Cunt,’ he once yelled at me, rolling in at 3am, pinning me to the bed and breathing heavily into my ear.

‘Then I found out I was pregnant again.’ I drank, three large gulps. The beer fizzed in my throat. ‘Once again, I convinced myself it was a good thing: everyone had problems, a baby would surely fix ours. And for a while things did get better. But then they got worse. Much worse. And then Ollie got into trouble at school.’

One day, when I’d been figuring out how to conceal the bruises on my upper arms and ribs, I got a call from Ollie’s school to say that police were investigating allegations that male students had been distributing explicit images of their female classmates. They’d uploaded the images to a file-sharing platform and then passed the link around. The girls were shockingly young.

‘The school confirmed that Ollie wasn’t directly involved,’ I said, ‘but he got caught with the link on his phone – which to me was just as bad. He hadn’t reported it, hadn’t told anyone, just passed it on like it was nothing. I got angry and made a fuss, told the school they were incompetent. But really I was mad at myself. The whole thing was my fault, because of what I’d made Ollie live with. Because of the example I’d set.’