Free What the Light Hides by Mette Jakobsen

dresses, their bags tucked at the side of their stools.
    I ran to the back of the pub, into the kitchen and then out onto the back lane, but he wasn’t there. Then I searched the bathrooms.
    A man in his twenties, a younger version of Neil with bright red hair and a striped shirt, was smoking a joint at the sink.
    I glanced at the cubicles. He followed my look.
    ‘Are you a spy, bro?’ he asked.
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘You’re one of them spies,’ he insisted.
    ‘I am not a spy,’ I said and felt like punching him.
    ‘Want a puff?’
    ‘No, thank you.’
    ‘No, thank you,’ he mimicked.
    I could hear him laugh as I left the bathroom and walked out of the pub.
    On the drive back to the mountains my certainty grew. I replayed the image of Ben walking into the pub as I raced past cliffs and gums; the dry landscape seemed infused with hope, bursting with wild beauty.
    After parking in our driveway I rushed into the house and barely managed a hello to Vera’s mum, who was in the laundry pulling clothes out of the dryer. I found Vera in the kitchen. She was pouring water into the coffee plunger and I took notice of the steam hitting the window glass. Vera was wearing a sleeveless blue dress. Her arms were tanned and her feet were bare in her work boots. Her hair hung loose, reaching her lower back.
    ‘Vera,’ I said. ‘Something just happened.’
    ‘What?’ She turned towards me, her eyes red and swollen from crying.
    And the words fell out of me. ‘I saw him. Just now. Vera, Ben is alive.’ And then it was out—hot, hard and irreversible.
    She looked at me. The kitchen was quiet. I couldn’t read her.
    Then she turned her back to me.
    ‘I saw him, Vera.’
    The border collie two doors down gave a whine, something in between a bark and howl. The light moved, flickering with the tree outside, and licked the hem of her dress.
    ‘Vera? Did you hear what I said?’
    ‘Don’t.’ She stayed with her back towards me. She reached out and picked up a rubber band from the bench. It was purple. It came from a bunch of asparagus that we had bought the day before. She put up her hair, slowly.
    ‘Vera,’ I said and took a step towards her. The floorboards squeaked and I had a sudden image of being in a war hospital talking to someone badly injured. ‘Vera,’ I said, ‘we don’t know for sure. We don’t know that he’s dead.’
    She grabbed the full coffee plunger and threw it to the floor; it shattered into a thousand pieces and coffee was everywhere. On her, on me.
    Then her legs gave way and she slid down against the kitchen cupboard until she sat on the floor. She started to cry.
    Her mum appeared in the doorway holding a pair of my workpants.
    ‘Vera.’ I bent down to help her up. ‘Vera, don’t sit on the floor, there’s glass. Don’t.’
    She didn’t hear me. She kept crying and when I placed a hand on her arm to help her up she scrambled away from me, past her mum and out of the kitchen. I could hear her enter the bathroom and the shower being turned on.
    The glass fragments glimmered in the light like stars. I thought for a moment that that was how it was going to be from then on; that somehow I had broken something bigger and that the kitchen would forever be inhabited by coffee grinds and tiny shards of glass.
    We didn’t talk about it. Vera avoided me for days and none of our movements were in sync. One night several weeks later I found her in the living room watching the video of the swimming races again. I turned the TV off and together we walked through the dark house. She didn’t turn away from me when we were back in bed. I moved closer, put a hand on her back and drew her towards me.
    ‘No,’ she said, stiffening against me. ‘Don’t.’
    I waited for her to say more, thinking how different her voice sounded. Still deep, still warm, but frail somehow.
    ‘Grief,’ she said into the darkness. ‘Grief does different things to people. What you experienced…seeing Ben, it’s grief,