Free Listening to Mondrian by Nadia Wheatley Page B

never able to talk to you when you were here, and now it is so hard, for I have to speak through miles of distance. And I know that you thought that I was a nag and a shrew, for I sent you to learn your letters, and I forced you and I pushed you, because I did not want you to be like me, and stuck in a place like this for ever. But while I harassed you under my roof, I never told you that my heart would catch every time you walked in the door. So that I would hide my joy in you by picking on your faults, until one day you were gone. And now your Absence is a continual source of Grief to
    Your Loving Mother.
    I think I’d read the letter a couple of times – maybe first as me, and then as Seamus (or perhaps the other way round) – when I became aware of the way my mother was sitting. Her body was tense – not tight, like how she gets when she’s angry, but just perfectly still and alert. As if she was listening to something.
    A tap dripping? I wondered. A mouse? Or did she think she could she hear some sort of intruder, maybe fiddling with the flyscreen on the bedroom window? Or was a branch from one of the pine trees splitting in the wind?
    I listened hard myself, but I couldn’t hear anything. ‘What?’ I started to say, but my mother instantly reached across the table and put her fingers on my lips, to shush me. Obviously whatever the noise was, it wasn’t worrying her.
    After a few minutes – I couldn’t bear the suspense – I scribbled her a note: ‘What are we listening to?’
    ‘The silence,’ she wrote back to me.
    As I read it, I suddenly realised. While we had been lost in time, the wind had dropped, the storm had ceased. With the electricity still out, there was none of that hum you get in a house, from the refrigerator, the other appliances. It must be late, I can remember thinking, because there was no traffic on the street. The only sound was of that deep quietness that comes before snow.
    Talking of time shifts, it’s now the last day of the year. Countdown to blast off.
    I said at the beginning that I’m not always sure where the reality stops and the invention starts (how did Mum make up the same weird priest’s name that I did?) and since that night I’ve sometimes felt kind of haunted, but in a good way, by this bloke I made up. I mean that since then, I’ve felt Seamus in me, known him as part of me. And through him I know that I can do it alone. Just me, and my piece of wire, my nails, my broken mirror, my tin whistle. Or me and my skateboard and whatever fits into my backpack.
    At the same time, I know that because I can do it, I don’t have to. Yet.
    Like that same winter’s night, after I’d gone to bed, I woke up and I looked out the window, and the snow had started. I went to the back door, put my gumboots on, so I could go rushing out into it, like I used to do when I was a little kid. And then I looked at the snow that was starting to cover the ground in perfect newness, and I thought: it’ll be even deeper if I leave it till the morning.
    Now I say to Mum, ‘Let’s catch the train down to Sydney this arvo. We can go to Rozelle, hear Dad play . . .’
    ‘OK,’ she says, ‘but what about all your stuff?’
    ‘I’m staying,’ I tell her.
    Mum isn’t very good at showing what she’s feeling so she just starts shifting the junk from the floor back into the shelves and cupboard. We work together in silence until my mother starts stacking the CDs next to the CD player.
    ‘What’re you doing?’ I ask as the air suddenly reverberates with the opening bars of ‘Are You Experienced?’
    ‘Welcome home, Seamus Murphy,’ Mum shouts.

P ASTORAL
    Uncle Clem was a man in blue football shorts and a blue singlet. The soles of his feet were made of calluses and he seemed to walk on little springs. Every morning just before dawn he ricocheted across the paddocks to get the cows up. Sometimes from her bed on the verandah Denzil could hear him yelling at Kylie, the blue cattle